If you’re wondering where you’ve heard that line before, it’s from the 1967 film Cool Hand Luke after a backwards warden beats the handcuffed title character. The communication failure in the movie was in form of a rebellious Paul Newman at the height of his refusal to acquiesce.
In this case, however, I’m no Paul Newman but I still refuse to use Facebook.
Almost three months is a long time to go without knowing why a city’s police chief has been on paid leave during an undisclosed personnel matter, and a week is a long time to go without knowing the city’s police chief has been fired.
Considering the latter happened smack between Christmas and New Year’s Day, that seems pretty understandable. The time between September and December in 2023 was actually my lack of paying attention since I’ve abandoned my social media presence with Meta.
Even Luke had to take a few beatings, but thankfully my stubbornness has only bruised my ego.
Here’s the super-short of what I’ve learned (with links):
Back in late August 2023, a local attorney posted to Facebook an alleged email between several members of the Ardmore Police Department regarding the attorney’s client and state law. Attorney Jason May claims the advice dispensed in the email directs officers to arrest an undisclosed man if he has a firearm and deprive him of his Second Amendment right.
Ardmore Police Chief Cameron Arthur, who was included as a recipient of the alleged email, was placed on leave three days after that email was originally sent and only one day after May made his allegation.
“Hopefully this indicates that the City of Ardmore is taking APD’s blatant disregard for the Second Amendment rights of citizens seriously,” May said in a followup Facebook post the day Arthur was placed on leave.
Ardmore City Hall declined to elaborate with either local television station nor the newspaper, which is not unheard of for privacy reasons whether you like it or not. The potential leak of an internal police communique that implicates something between incompetence and corruption, however, is not something I’m used to seeing.
Unfortunately, I didn’t catch anything about the leaked email because I was relying solely on the information from four particular outlets — Ardmore City Hall, The Ardmoreite, KXII and KTEN — all of which had mostly dropped the story in early September.
Since I haven’t used any Meta products in roughly a year, I was not among the Facebook users who would have seen May’s post that was shared at least 132 times. My cursory internet searches over the course of those three months also did not turn up anything about this allegation.
I wrongly assumed what little information was available about the entire saga would have been reported.
When I finally saw a headline about Arthur’s firing last week, I broke down and started digging for the first time into what had happened. It didn’t take long once I started looking and I actually found it along with a new source of information: The Brady List.
That’s going to be a really fun resource moving forward.
“I wish you’d stop being so good to me, Zuck.”