These are comments that were posted on APD Detective Pete Dwyer’s Twitter account.
A day after Police Chief Ray Schultz said Detective Pete Dwyer wouldn’t be disciplined for an “inappropriate” comment on his MySpace page, APD is looking into Dwyer’s Twitter postings that include a joke about Muslims and a comment about “pistol whipping.”
One of the Twitter images depicted a Nazi swastika flag merged with a Barack Obama campaign logo.
Schultz said Dwyer will be reassigned to desk duty while Internal Affairs looks into comments and images posted on the social networking website.
Dwyer “has been told to show up at 8:30 in the morning (today) at Internal Affairs with his badge, his gun and his car,” Schultz said late Thursday. “Obviously we have some serious problems here.”
APD’s social media compliance officer discovered Dwyer’s Twitter posts Thursday – the same day the Journal published a story about his MySpace page, which included the comment: “Some people are alive only because killing them is illegal.”
Schultz said, “We respect and value the right to free speech, but comments that impair our officers’ ability to perform their duties and brings discredit to the Albuquerque Police Department will not be tolerated.”
Dwyer is at least the third APD officer to be disciplined over comments on social networking websites. Detective Trey Economidy and Officer Jerry Hicks were disciplined earlier this year.
Some of the comments that Dwyer, a former Albuquerque Police Officers’ Association president and top auto theft detective, posted on Twitter included:
♦ “Next person that says ‘imma’ instead of ‘I am going to’ I’m going to pistol whip.”
♦ “The Muslims are like Chinook salmon.. Life’s great till the SEALS show up!”
♦ And an exchange with another Twitter user that began with Dwyer’s post: “put this on (Facebook) as it needs to be seen. Boss ordered me to remove it or be fired. Love wrkin 4 a Dem.”
A link in that post led to an image of a Nazi swastika flag emerging from beneath a red, white and blue logo from Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. In response to a post from the other Twitter user, Dwyer responded: “I told him to kissmyass and it’s still there! Love workin for the guvment! See if I have a job on monday.”
The posts were dated between May 20 and June 4.
Dwyer could not be reached for comment.
Schultz said he did not learn of Dwyer’s Twitter account until Thursday morning. The chief said he was not the “boss” Dwyer referred to in his post, and he had not told the detective to remove the swastika image.
“One of the things we’ll be looking at is: Did somebody else (within APD) know about this, and if they did, why didn’t they report it?” he said. “It may be that another supervisor could get caught up in all this.”
Regarding his MySpace page, Dwyer told Schultz that he had forgotten about it and hadn’t posted anything on it in nearly four years. He was not disciplined for those posts.
In neither case does he identify himself as a city employee.
Earlier this year, APD instituted a comprehensive social media policy after officers’ inappropriate comments were discovered on different sites.
For example, Economidy, who was involved in the fatal shooting of a suspect earlier this year, had posted his job description as “human waste disposal” on his Facebook page.
Economidy, who identified himself on Facebook as a city employee, was suspended four days and reassigned to a lower profile beat.
Dwyer’s name has also come up in the midst of another controversy, one that he mentioned on his Twitter account.
APD criminal and Internal Affairs investigators are looking into how a vehicle identification number plate from a truck once owned by Dwyer ended up on a truck owned by former APD cop and wife-killing suspect Levi Chavez.
That truck, which Chavez had reported stolen, was seized in Mexico on Feb. 6 after a traffic stop.
Dwyer’s truck had been totaled in a 2008 crash on I-25 and had been sold at auction by his insurance company.
On June 4, the same day a story about the VIN plate situation appeared in the Journal, Dwyer posted on his Twitter account: “So frustrated with liberal lying media.”
Chavez, who was charged in April with Tera Chavez’s murder in Valencia County, had reported his F-250 stolen from the couple’s Los Lunas home in October 2007. Later that month, Tera Chavez was found in the home, dead of a gunshot wound from her husband’s APD-issued pistol.
According to a wrongful death lawsuit filed against Levi by his wife’s family, Tera Chavez was trying to report to authorities that her husband and his “cop buddies” had staged the theft of Levi’s truck.
— This article appeared on page A1 of the Albuquerque Journal
Cutline – Shown is a screen-capture image from Albuquerque Police Department Detective Pete Dwyer’s Twitter page. The department is looking into Dwyer’s postings on the social networking website.
Reprint story -- Email the reporter at jproctor@abqjournal.com. Call the reporter at 505-823-3951
