City leaders defend Chief Hickman's Confederate vest
PORT CLINTON – City officials said Thursday they have heard no complaints, formally or informally, about social media posts showing Port Clinton Police Chief Robert Hickman wearing a Confederate flag vest.
Mayor Vince Leone said not only has the city received no complaints about Hickman since the photographs were made public over the weekend, but there have been none during his three-year tenure as mayor, neither about the vest nor Hickman’s performance in the field.
“Chief Hickman has demonstrated his undivided loyalty to our community,” Leone said. “That loyalty has not wavered or diminished by the color of one’s skin nor the status within our community.”
Port Clinton Auditor Cole Hatfield also confirmed that there are no complaints on record in regards to Hickman and the photographs. Safety Service Director Tracy Colston said he has heard no complaints, and added that he had no other comment on the matter. Police Department officers also declined to comment.
The date and time the photographs were taken have not been established. But at some point the photos were shared on Facebook and, despite privacy settings applied, copies eventually were made public.
Hickman declined to comment on the photos other than to echo a statement he posted on Facebook in response to the incident:
“WHAT we do on our personal vacation half way across the country is no one’s business!” read the Facebook post. “THERE was nothing illegal, immoral, unethical or wrong … the flag means a lot of things to a lot of people but it only has a racist meaning to those people who are racist!”
Nothing was mentioned about the photos of the chief in the Confederate flag vest at Tuesday’s Port Clinton city council meeting.
G. Michael Payton, executive director of the Ohio Civil Rights Commission, pointed out the chief of police has First Amendment rights as a private citizen, but leaders should still be careful about symbols that they display.
“I think we must be mindful and sensitive to the fact that sometimes symbolic things, while it might not have meaning to us, others might take it to have a different meaning,” Payton said. “Sometimes we might have an innocent intent but it ends up nonetheless unintentionally hurting people.”
In his experience, Payton said, there are “sincerely held beliefs” on both sides regarding the Confederate flag.
“On the one hand there are those that say somehow that flag deals with a historical notion, has a historical basis,” he said. “And then there are those that believe that flag also stands for a symbol of oppression and racism.”
He added that symbolic speech, whether on a pin, bumper sticker or elsewhere, it does say something. He said the question is then what the person displaying it wants it to say.
“With all cases, you want to look at the totality of the circumstances of whatever that’s involved in,” Payton said.
An expert on politics and law said the rules can apply differently to public officials than for average citizens.
Greg Walterhouse, an instructor of political science at Bowling Green State University, said the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that “police and fire officials are held to a higher standard than the general public,” and that the personal rights of public figures “can be limited.”
“There is a balancing test to weigh out the rights of the individuals and the good of the general public, or the good of the agency that they represent,” he said.
Walterhouse said there have been a number of cases in which police officers and firefighters have been either disciplined or terminated for things that they’ve said or done in public, and “one of the most common means for that occurring today is on Facebook.”
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