A Georgia cop is unemployed after a man driving by her home reported to authorities that she was flying the Confederate flag.
Sergeant Silvia Cotriss says she had “no idea” that the some of her neighbors found the flag offensive, and, in an appeal of her termination, says that she was just celebrating her Southern heritage and “part of history involving the Civil War.”
Cotriss says she flew the flag in front of her Roswell, Ga., home for over a year without any complaint from friends or neighbors—and if she’d known it was causing a disturbance, she’d have removed it sooner. She told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “If I knew it offended someone, my friends, my family, I wouldn’t do it.”
But Cotriss’s department moved quickly to take action against the 20-year veteran of the Roswell Police Department, who before the flag incident, had only been disciplined once before (and had been routinely commended by her superiors). Roswell’s Chief of Police, Rusty Grant, had been making a serious effort to bond with the surrounding community and, it seems, Cotriss’s flag interfered with his plan.
Grant attended a service at a historically African-American congregation in the week before Cotriss was fired, and the complaint his office received referenced the service, and addressed Grant directly. “It is very difficult to explain to my daughter that we should trust our police,” the complaint noted. “But in the same sentiment if I were to ever be pulled over or some situation where my family needs the police to protect and serve, my first thought/fear is that it may be the officer proudly flying his/her Confederate flag.”
The complaint also noted that Cotriss’s squad car was in the driveway, under the flag —a point Cotriss disputes, claiming her car was in for repair when the complaint came in.
Cotriss, even as a law enforcement officer, has a First Amendment right to free speech. She carries that right even if that speech is unpopular, and even in, as her department investigators put it, “today’s environment.”
But police departments also have greater authority to restrict their employees’ (and especially their officers’) speech if they believe that speech might negatively affect public perception. While the Supreme Court hasn’t spoken specifically on the right to display the Confederate flag, the US District Court did find, in 2014, that a police officer displaying the flag as his Facebook cover photo could lead to a “negative perception” of the police department as a whole, and that a police department could discipline that officer without impacting his Constitutional rights.
A First Amendment attorney involved with Cotriss’s case says that her situation is a “close call.”
“If anything,” she told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “that shows they need to do some more sensitivity training.”
Cotriss maintains that she had no idea the Confederate flag has negative connotations. She doesn’t watch the news, so she didn’t realize the flag had figured in a recent high-profile mass shooting in South Carolina: “Cops don’t watch the news because we live it in the day and don’t want to see it again at night.”