Mayor Stephen Cassidy

Mayor Stephen Cassidy seems to be getting very nervous. He stopped me – and only me – from being able to post comments to his notes on his Mayoral Facebook page after I started writing about his lack of integrity and his repeated violations of open government laws.  He seems to be getting pettier and more fearful, though.  His latest stunt is to ban me from following his official Mayor account on twitter.

A twitter ban doesn’t stop you from reading someone’s tweets or replying to them – it just stops you from re-tweeting them.  So it would seem that Cassidy is afraid that he will tweet something really stupid and that I’ll re-tweet it before he has a chance to delete it.

More, of course, is going on.  About a month ago, I wrote an article explaining how Cassidy has done such a dismal job as mayor that I was even considering running against him myself, if nobody better jumped into the fray.    He definitely seems not pleased at the prospect.

More to the point, a few weeks ago I filed a complaint with Mayor Cassidy, the City Manager and City Attorney Richard Pio Roda about the San Leandro Police Department’s violations of the City’s social media guidelines.  The SLPD has been posting photographs of people on their facebook and twitter feeds without their consent, and they have removed comments that they do not like but otherwise do not violate the guidelines.  This complaint would apply just as well to Mayor Cassidy, who also has many photographs on his official facebook page that show people that can be identified and for whom he’s unlikely to have signed releases.

My guess is that the Council will rewrite the social media rules – they seem to have been removed them from the City’s website -, but until then Mayor Cassidy probably doesn’t want me to call him on how he’s breaking them.

Alas, there is no better way to saying “I have something to hide” than to telling someone “you can’t look here”.