An Ontario (S. Calif.) police dispatcher who allegedly received sex-related text messages sent by an OPD officer using his city-issued pager is a plaintiff in a civil lawsuit being appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Dispatcher April Florio was the girlfriend of officer Jeff Quon in 2003 when an audit of pager messages revealed the explicit messages, and that Quon had frequently gone over the message limit for the city’s pager account. Quon sent messages to Florio, his estranged—a former OPD dispatcher—and to an OPD sergeant, according to the federal lawsuit that claims the city had no right to read the pager messages. In 2007 a jury sided with the city’s contention that the pager and account belonged to them, that Quon had signed the city’s electronic device policy, and that they had the right to examine the account and messages. But a U.S. District court reversed the jury’s decision in 2007. The city appealed that ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, and that court heard oral arguments on the case last week. The decision, expected this fall, is expected to set an important precedent on workplace privacy, especially involving company-owned cellular phones, pagers and Internet-connected devices. The court’s decision could apply not only to the privacy of the senders of messages, but also to the receivers. Read more about the details of the lawsuit here.
According to court documents filed by the city with the Supreme Court appeal, “This case has its genesis in gross malfeasance which, no one disputes, took place in the Ontario Police Department’s dispatch center in the early part of this decade.”
Dispatcher Sally Bors was under investigation in September 2002, “for providing information to her boyfriend Mark Timbrell, who was a member of the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang, regarding police investigative activity about the Hell’s Angels in general and Timbrell in particular,” the documents state.
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