Superior Court ruling: Names of Manchester police supervisors to be published in racist meme case

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Manchester Police Headquarters on Valley Street. Picture file

CONCORD, NH – On January 26, 2023, Hillsborough Superior Court issued a decision ordering the public to be entitled to the names of two Manchester Police Department supervisors who were part of a group of officers who received a colleague a text message. post sharing a racist meme depicting George Floyd.

In March 2021 Manchester Police Department (MPD) conducted a misconduct investigation into Constable Christian Horns during which, while on duty in February 2021, he sent other officers a meme that made a joke about the May 2020 murder of George Floyd. The report ultimately produced from the investigation contained redacted information about two supervisors who saw the racist meme and did not report it. On October 5, 2022, Black Lives Matter Manchester and the ACLU of New Hampshire filed a lawsuit seeking unredacted information.

Ronelle Tshiela, co-founder of Black Lives Matter Manchester, said: “This decision is a victory for transparency. As the court mentioned, the police officers willingly submitted themselves to greater public scrutiny because of the nature of their work. When racism is both widespread and persistent in our local police force, and no one is saying a word, members of our community deserve to know that their leaders have chosen inaction and therefore complicity.

In its ruling, the court wrote: That supervisors’ inaction in response to Detective Horns’ text constitutes tacit acceptance or support of racist or manifestly inappropriate and racially insensitive behavior, or is emblematic of systemic racism in the within the Manchester Police Department, is a matter worthy of public discourse.

As the Court and the lawsuit explain, police officers have little interest in privacy in cases involving the performance of their official duties—in this case, the apparent failure, justified or not, to report racist behavior .

The public deserves to know who these supervisors are in a concerning case of racism where a group of police officers who knew about this meme did nothing, said Gilles Bissonnette, legal director for the ACLU of New Hampshire. Police officers should not and cannot remain anonymous in cases involving the performance of their official duties, in this case the apparent failure to report racist behaviour. We are glad the court agrees: this information is in the interest of public disclosure.

On Friday, an attempt by the Ink Link to contact Manchester Police Chief Allen Aldenberg failed.

As the March 2021 MPD report notes, one of the Manchester officers who received the text and was offended by its dissemination expressed concern that if he simply flagged this issue up the chain of command, he would not be taken seriously. As the Department’s report indicates, the person who complained about the racist text went out of their chain of command to report the incident, as they felt the lack of response from [a supervisor] hinted that he would get no support from his own chain of command. In other words, as the report notes, the complaining officer was not only offended by the meme itself, but by the apparent lack of outrage and condemnation by the other recipients of the text thread.

Press release submitted by the ACLU-NH

View court documents, including the order, here.

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