Reference no: EM132204473
On the Edge Sergeant Quon’s Text Messages Jeff Quon worked as a sergeant on the SWAT team of the Ontario, California Police Department.39 The department provided him and all other officers with pagers that allowed text messaging with a monthly limit of 25,000 characters, above which the city of Ontario had to pay extra. The city issued a written “Communication Usage, Internet, and E-Mail Policy” that said “the use of these tools for personal benefit is a significant violation of City of Ontario Policy,” but “some incidental and occasional personal use of the e-mail system, if limited to light personal communications” is permitted. In addition, the policy continued, “The City of Ontario reserves the right to monitor and log all network activity including e-mail and Inter- net use, with or without notice; users should have no expecta- tion of privacy or confidentiality when using these resources.” The policy reminded officers that all such “messages are also subject to ‘access and disclosure’ in the legal system and the media”; that is, they could be revealed if a court subpoenaed them during a trial or if reporters requested them under a free- dom of information statute or a public records disclosure stat- ute. Sergeant Quon signed an acknowledgement that he read and understood the policy. In addition, he attended a meeting where all officers were told that pager messages were consid- ered e-mails under the policy “and could be audited.” A few days later, he received a memo reminding him of that policy.
When Quon went over the 25,000-character monthly limit on his pager for the first time, he was approached by a superior, Lieutenant Steve Duke. Lieutenant Duke reminded him that his messages “could be audited.” However, the lieutenant explicitly added that he would not “audit employees’ text messages to see if the overage was due to work-related transmissions” as long as the employee “reimbursed the City for [the] overage.” Only if Quon did not pay for the overage would it be necessary to “audit the transmission to see how many messages were work-related.” Sergeant Quon paid the overage in full and when he went over the limit three or four more times, he also paid each overage in full and, as the lieu- tenant had said, his messages were not examined. However, when he went over the limit a fifth time, Lieutenant Duke did not ask Quon to pay for the overage but instead obtained a transcript of all his messages and read through them. He discovered that some messages were to or from Quon’s wife, “while others were directed to or from his mistress” and some of these were sexually explicit. The lieutenant showed these to his superior, Chief Scharf, and pointed out that the depart- ment’s policy expressly prohibited “the use of inappropriate, derogatory, obscene, suggestive, defamatory, or harassing language” in messages.
What, ethically, should Chief Scharf do? What should Lieutenant Duke do?
Was Lieutenant Duke's assurance that he would not examine Sergeant Quon's messages so long as Quon paid for any overage an implicit agreement that he was entitled to rely on? Was it an implicit agreement that Duke was morally required to keep?
Did Lieutenant Duke or Chief Scharf violate Sergeant Quon's right to privacy? If they did, explain why; if they did not, then explain what additional events would have to happen for the incident to be a violation of the right to privacy and why those additions are necessary.