By NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — Hutchinson Police Chief Jeff Hooper said there was some social media activity regarding the Emancipation Day flags posted downtown in Hutchinson that his department looked into this week, but that no one is being charged with any wrongdoing.
"City staff received several phone calls," Hooper said. "We received emails and phone calls as well here. We dug into all those allegations and all the calls, dug into the social media posts, used our criminal intelligence analyst to look at those things. The bottom line is, there's no criminal activity there at all, it's a bunch of people that have varying views of those flags and were basically expressing their right to freedom of speech."
As long as the right to express those opinions doesn't infringe on another's rights to the same thing, it's a perfectly legal activity.
"That's our job and our responsibility at the police department to protect everybody's Constitutional right," Hooper said. "If anybody steps over the line and violates the law, that's when we have to step in and take action, but we certainly support being able to speak their views."
If there were any destruction of city property, that would be an act the department would need to address, however.
"If you call and threaten to do harm to a person or something, that could be a crime," Hooper said. "Threatening to damage property, somebody else's property or city property, that, in and of itself, is not a crime. If the individual then takes an overt act or does actually damage that property or sets it on fire or different things like that. That's when we step over the line and that becomes a criminal matter."
The Emancipation Day flags have been put up in Hutchinson in commemoration of that event for the past several years.