UPDATED: Moose Jaw Police delete, apologize, for tweet making fun of a prisoner

MOOSE JAW –UPDATE: The member of the Moose Jaw Police Service responsible for a tweet that appeared to be making fun of a prisoner, has had their social media privileges revoked.

On Monday, Chief Rick Bourassa said that an investigation into the matter has been launched through the Public Complaints Commission. Additionally Bourassa said that the service is now speeding up the process of creating an official social media policy, which was in the process of being drafted prior to the Twitter incident.

“The notion behind us moving to social media was to enhance our openness and transparency and our accountability. We have done that and now that we have been open and transparent we have been held accountable; and that’s the way it should be,” he said.

The Moose Jaw Police Service apologized after the tweet was sent out by their official Twitter account.

The tweet was posted shortly before 6 p.m. on Thursday and read: “adult female prisoner asked officer to pass around a hat today to help her with her bail money #short of the goal #she is still here #we don’t wear hats”.

The next night the tweet was deleted and an apology was issued.

However, this did not stop a barrage of angry responses demanding more accountability, with some even going as far as calling for the person responsible to be fired.

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Bourassa said he found out about the tweet once he began seeing the angry responses, and quickly got to work to see the issue was properly addressed.

“Well there’s always a combination of things that need to go in place, and that’s correcting the mistake that was made, which is critical, and then moving forward to ensure that we don’t repeat or make mistakes like that as we go on,” he said on Saturday.

According to Bourassa four members of the service have access to the general Twitter account.

“Again very sorry for that comment. It should not have happened. It did and now we have to do the work to correct that and chart a course moving forward,” he said.