Facebook Profile Pic Prompts Police Visit

Two police officers confronted a young woman and told her that her home was going to be searched, based on a profile photo she posted on Facebook of her wearing a police uniform.

Kvennablaðið reports that Kleópatra Mjöll Heiðudóttir was recently confronted at a night club by two plainclothes police officers, who told her that her Facebook profile photo had prompted the police to want to search her home. In the photo in question, which can be seen at the source link, Kleópatra is wearing a police officer’s uniform, though she is herself not on the force.

“I took this as a joke, and asked if they intended to confiscate my handcuffs,” she told reporters. “They obviously did not find this funny, and when it became clear to me that they were serious, I was just speechless. I expected they were going to arrest me, but I didn’t believe that they had received a warrant to search my home due to this photo. So I asked them if they were actually going to wake up my children because I put a picture on the internet that they didn’t like.”

The officers allegedly accused Kleópatra of theft. She informed them, truthfully, that she was actually on the set of a movie and had been allowed to borrow the costume. She said she could not resist the temptation to try it on, and took a photo of herself in it.

Kleópatra at this point asked the officers, “Are only humorless people on the police force who have nothing better to do?”, eventually asking “to get this over with”, so long as they had an actual warrant to search her home.

The officers reportedly left the club, neither arresting Kleópatra nor searching her home.

Kleópatra points out that this raises many questions, amongst them: “Is it common for the police to bother people in night clubs with things like this? Is it common that the police threaten to search people’s homes, even though they don’t have a warrant? Can they? And not least of all, how many hours does the Facebook Police spend supervising the internet habits of citizens, and what kind of posting is considered reason enough to suspect people of breaking the law?”