Editor’s note: What Mom, Dad and the Academy Didn’t Teach You is a nine-part career survival series from Gordon Graham and Bruce “Coach Sok” Sokolove, two self-described “geezer cops” with more than seven decades of law enforcement experience between them. Drawing on what they’ve learned as officers, supervisors, trainers and observers of the profession, the series explores the everyday decisions that can protect — or quietly derail — a law enforcement career. Each installment tackles one lesson they believe officers should learn early, rather than the hard way.
Between the two of us, we have more than seven decades in this profession. We have been officers, supervisors, trainers and, in the later chapters of our careers, observers — watching good cops make entirely avoidable mistakes.
Not bad cops. Good ones.
The academy teaches you to do the job. Arrest techniques, firearms qualification, criminal law and first aid. What it does not teach — and what nobody seems to teach, at least not plainly and early enough — is the ecology of a law enforcement career: the legal, professional, social and personal environment in which that career will either survive or get quietly dismantled.
This series shares nine practical lessons that too many officers learn the hard way. Lesson one looked at how your digital footprint is a professional liability. In this installment, we examine how becoming a police officer changes the practical boundaries of a right many Americans take for granted: freedom of speech.
Lesson 2: Your free speech rights narrowed the day you were hired
Most officers are surprised by this. The landmark case is Garcetti v. Ceballos (2006), in which the Supreme Court held speech made pursuant to official duties is not protected under the First Amendment. What this means, in practice, is the broad latitude most Americans enjoy to speak their minds does not follow you onto the job — and in many respects, does not follow you off it either.
Off-duty social media posts that comment on pending cases, express political views in your capacity as an officer or undermine public confidence in your department can be grounds for discipline or termination. The boundary between protected personal speech and unprotected employee speech is genuinely blurry, and courts evaluate it case by case. When HR or Internal Affairs later judge a comment, they’re doing so with limited context and under different pressures than existed in the moment. In that setting, even well-intentioned reviewers often assign a different meaning than what the employee intended.
A particular trap is passive engagement: liking, sharing or reacting to content. Courts and arbitrators have found that an officer’s “like” of a post calling for violence against protesters constitutes expression subject to departmental discipline. You may find this an absurd extension of the principle. Your opinion does not change the practical effect on your career.
Want more career lessons from Gordon and Bruce? Watch their on-demand webinar: 9 Career-Saving Lessons for Cops
Quick checklist: Think before you post
- Review your department’s social media and employee speech policies.
- Never comment publicly on a pending case.
- Do not use your position as an officer to give weight to a political opinion.
- Treat every like, share and reaction as a public statement.
- Consider how HR, Internal Affairs, a prosecutor or the public could interpret your words.
- When in doubt, do not post.