Politics & Government
Apology Issued Over Accidental Retweet By Alameda County Sheriff's Office
A department spokesman was doing research in advance of an upcoming protest when he accidentally hit the retweet button.
ALAMEDA COUNTY, CA —An Alameda County sheriff's spokesman is apologizing for what he said was an accidental retweet Monday night of a video posted by white nationalist Richard Spencer.
The video was of a media briefing held by Spencer, a prominent white nationalist, following the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that turned deadly when a man drove a car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing a woman and injuring nearly two dozen other people.
Alameda County sheriff's Sgt. Ray Kelly said he was doing research on Spencer because he's a "focal point" of a right-wing rally planned in Berkeley on Aug. 27 that organizers have titled "No to Marxism in America." Kelly said when he was trying to close the video, he "hit a bunch of buttons at the bottom, and one must have been the retweet button."
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>>Related: Berkeley Braces For Right-Wing Rally
The tweet remained shared on the Twitter profile of the sheriff's office for an extended period of time, prompting inquiries from journalists and other Twitter users.
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"I'm not very savvy with Twitter," Kelly said. "I had to call our IT person to take it down, that's why it took a bit of time."
"It was a mistake, I deserve it on this one," he said, but emphasized "it was an accident, and there was no ill will or bad intention."
The Aug. 27 Berkeley event is planned for 1 p.m. in Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Center Park and is already prompting plans for a counter-protest. Multiple similar events organized by white nationalists took place in Berkeley earlier this year, most recently in late April following the cancellation of a planned speech by conservative commentator Ann Coulter at University of California at Berkeley.
A day before the Berkeley event planned for later this month, a right-wing group titled Patriot Prayer is organizing an Aug. 26 rally at Crissy Field in San Francisco.
Counter-protests are also expected at that event, and National Park Service officials have said they are working with U.S. Park Police and San Francisco police and firefighters to develop security plans.
— Bay City News; Image via Pixabay
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