SAN FRANCISCO, CA — Police officers have to perform a lot of dirty little jobs, but none are apparently so dirty as having sex with their own spouses in front of a running video camera. Such is a logical conclusion after the 9th U.S. Circuit declared one fired officer’s marital web romps to be “sleazy activities” worthy of dismissal from the force.Judge Ferdinand Fernandez affirmed the Arizona police department’s decision to release Ronald Dible from employment due to the creation and sale of “vulgar and indecent” erotic videos featuring himself and his wife.
Fernandez lectured Dible yesterday, while insisting that a lower court had appropriately dismissed the fired man’s claims that his First Amendment rights had been violated in 2002 by the Chandler, AZ police department.
The three-judge panel’s decision was written by Fernandez, who stated that “We have not abandoned our social codes to the point that a city can be sanctioned for violating a police officer’s First Amendment rights when he causes disrespect of the police department and its members by performing in and purveying pictures of his and his wife’s sexually explicit activities over the Internet.”
While the judges conceded that Dible and his wife “may have the constitutional right to run his sex-oriented business,” they did not conclude that this meant that the police department must continue to simultaneously provide him with employment.
“The law and their own safety demands that they be given a degree of respect, and the sleazy activities of Ronald and Megan Dible could not help but undermine that respect,” the court declared.
