A tweet sent by ACT Policing on New Year’s Eve containing explicit images breached police guidelines, an internal investigation has concluded.
On 31 December, ACT Policing’s official account retweeted photos of a naked woman with the hashtag #ThonglessThursday. The original tweet had been sent by @KSanders0902 more than two weeks earlier.
ACT Policing had also favourited other explicit tweets by the user.
The force was left embarrassed by the error, admitting on Twitter that it was “not sure” how the tweet got on its page. It deleted the offending tweet, unfavourited older tweets by @KSanders0902 and quickly moved to establish an investigation.
In January, the chief police officer for the ACT, Rudi Lammers, said the message had been retweeted “inadvertently”.
“I can assure the Canberra community that our Twitter account is safe,” Lammers said. “This was an unintentional error by a member of ACT Policing outside the ACT Policing media team ... The member immediately saw the error and reported the incident to [Australian federal police] professional standards.”
@KSanders0902 nice to see the ACT police in Canberra Australia think you #rock on #thonglessthursday @ACTPolicing pic.twitter.com/Mg45M3KqK7
— Maggs Dale Robert (@convictstock) December 31, 2014
That investigation has now concluded. The AFP, which provides police services for the capital through ACT Policing, concluded that there were “two established breaches of the AFP code of conduct”. It said the person involved had been notified of the conclusions.
The person involved in the incident was not disciplined, as they had resigned before the investigation was finished. The resignation was unrelated to the tweet, a spokeswoman for the AFP said.
“Due to privacy reasons, the AFP is not able to comment further or identify the former member,” she said.
