BEECH GROVE, Ind. -- The city of Beech Grove is facing a lawsuit from the ACLU over claims deleting comments from its Facebook page violated citizens' First Amendment rights.
Community crime watch members Kymberly Quick and Deborah Mays-Miller filed the lawsuit Wednesday, but the tensions started in October when officers deleted a comment posted by Quick.
Since then, the pair says multiple comments written by Quick and Miller have been deleted from pages run by the city and police department.
"In some instances, I'm told, one of them was inflammatory," said City Attorney Craid Wiley.
In June, the women were blocked from the page.
Jan Mensz, staff attorney for the ACLU of Indiana, says a government entity can't just open a public forum like Facebook and then censor those comments based on their viewpoint.
"You have a city government where citizens are posing legitimate questions to how they function and their performance, and that really goes to the heart of the First Amendment," Mensz said.
But city representatives believe they have a right to moderate what's written on their pages.
"We're investigating this," Wiley said. "We think we have a right to regulate some speech in a limited form, but that's something we're looking into right now."
For residents of the city, the lawsuit is somewhat perplexing.
"You do have the right to, like, say what you want to say, but it just … I don't understand why she would want to sue," one resident said.
"You're really going to go that mile just to sue somebody over Facebook?" said Casey Eversole. "To me it just doesn't seem that deep."
The city says it will try to resolve the issue outside of court.
