This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Saturday, December 31st, 2022.

I'm Keelip Brown.

Making fun of public figures is well understood to be protected speech but what about public agencies

specifically local cops in two cases the local cops didn't really care for the

jokes and decided to intervene kateos Tommy Barry details the cases and why they might have

implications for the famously dubious doctrine known as qualified immunity.

When it comes to criticizing the police, what do we know about how the First Amendment

functions? Well we know most importantly that parodies are protected by the

First Amendment. There's a Supreme Court case about Hustler magazine where they did a rather raunchy of a public figure,

Jerry Falwell, and the Supreme Court said squarely that the First Amendment protects jokes,

even if they're offensive to some, even if they're parodies that might fool people for a certain amount of time,

that if the reasonable reader understands, after reflection, that this is a parody, not a serious statement statement it's protected by the First Amendment and you can't bring a claim of defamation

You can't bring a claim you can't criminalize it and you otherwise can't get around that that basic fact that it's protected by the First Amendment.

Okay that's making fun of Jerry Falwell though. What about local cops?

Local cops under the same rules or at least they should be though a lot of cops don't

seem to believe they fall under the same rules. All right so you have two cases

here that are similar and have sort of the same implication when it comes to making fun of cops

using a public forum essentially, Facebook. Facebook.

So what are these, describe these cases?

Sure.

So one was out of Parma, Ohio.

A guy decided to be funny, kind of be the local onion for the police force he creates a Facebook page that looks at first glance like it's the

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