By Jordan Vega · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Matthew Fleischer on FishbowlLA, October 2011
In mid-October 2011, FishbowlLA tracked the LAPD’s internal-policy struggle over what officers should and shouldn’t post on Twitter and other social media platforms. The trigger had been LAPD Homicide Detective Sal LaBarbera’s posting of a crime-scene photograph and related tweets that had raised questions about appropriate departmental social-media boundaries. The original framing connected the LAPD’s policy review to the broader international policing-and-social-media policy debate that Bill Bratton and others were also navigating elsewhere.
Then
The LAPD Internet Unit’s monitoring of public-Twitter-and-other-social-media for crowd-and-event signals (covered in batch 6’s flash-mob piece) had been the department’s outward-facing social-media-engagement question. The October 2011 piece flagged the parallel inward-facing question: what should the department do about its own officers’ Twitter accounts?
Sal LaBarbera was a longtime LAPD Homicide detective with a substantial public profile across LA-region crime reporting. His Twitter account had been one of the more visible LAPD-detective on-platform presences; the specific tweets that triggered the October 2011 policy review had been related to active-crime-scene work in ways that the department was now reviewing for policy fit.
Bill Bratton — the former LAPD Chief (2002-2009) who had moved to consulting work after his LAPD tenure — had been one of the international policing-policy figures most actively engaged with the social-media-and-policing question. His broader writing and consulting work had been substantively addressing the cross-jurisdictional version of the same question the LAPD was now navigating internally.
Matthew Fleischer’s FishbowlLA framing was characteristically wry. The piece treated the LAPD’s social-media-policy review as the kind of institutional-policy work that was structurally inevitable but operationally challenging — police departments globally were having to develop the same policies in real time, and the post-2011 social-media-and-policing question was substantively unresolved.
Now
The LAPD’s social-media policy infrastructure has substantially expanded across the years since 2011. The department’s official Twitter (now X) accounts, the broader departmental social-media engagement, and the individual-officer-account policy framework have all been substantially developed. The 2020 Black Lives Matter protests produced renewed attention to LAPD social-media monitoring and engagement practices; subsequent disclosures about the department’s use of Geofeedia, Dataminr, and other platform-monitoring vendors have substantially expanded the public record of how the department’s social-media infrastructure operates.
Sal LaBarbera retired from LAPD Homicide and has continued in true-crime media work across the post-2011 interval — including consulting on documentary projects, podcast appearances, and other public-facing work that has drawn on his decades of LAPD case experience.
Bill Bratton continued in policing consulting and writing work after his LAPD tenure, including a return to the NYPD as commissioner from 2014 to 2016. He has continued in consulting and policy work; his social-media-and-policing framing has aged into being one of the recurring reference points in subsequent law-enforcement-and-platform policy discussions.
The broader policing-and-social-media policy question that the 2011 piece flagged has been substantially expanded rather than resolved. The post-2020 reform discussions about police accountability, body-camera footage release, and platform-monitoring infrastructure have all involved substantively elevated versions of the same questions the LAPD was navigating in 2011.
The October 2011 piece reads now as one of the small documented early-decade snapshots of LAPD social-media policy development — captured at the moment when the department was still working through the basic-policy-framework questions that would later become substantially more politically charged.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.
More from the FishbowlLA archive
- Bill Handel’s March 2012 on-air flashpoint — KFI, the Black Media Alliance, and the Limbaugh aftermath
- Carol Muske-Dukes’s October 2012 HuffPost defense of Patt Morrison — and how the KPCC schedule shuffle played
- Hollywood Reporter’s Kim Dotcom cover story — Daniel Miller, Matthew Belloni, and the Megaupload prosecution