Lawrence Police Officers Fired For Racy MySpace Web Site

Two auxiliary officers in the Lawrence Police Department were fired for creating a web page which contained the official department emblem along with photos of scantily clad women and obscene language.

Police Chief John Romero announced that Sgt. David Russell, 28, of the Bradford section of Haverhill, and Joe Dethamphavane, 27, of Lowell, were dismissed for improper conduct that jeopardized the department's reputation and it's public image. Jay Jackson, chief of the all volunteer auxiliary force, said the officers confessed to using MySpace.com to set up the Web site. A Police Department secretary was the one who discovered the site by accident. She reported it to the Chief and Romero was trying to get a subpoena to force the Internet's social networking service to identify the names of the people who created the Web site. At the request of police, MySpace removed the site that was labeled "The Unofficial 'Official' Home of the LAWPD" and claimed to be "designed by affiliates of the Lawrence Police Department." Romero last night said he believes that Russell and Dethamphavane were the only ones involved in the creation of this site, but says he will continue to press forward with the subpoena to make sure that others did not participate The site had more than 170 "friends" linked to it, some of which contained suggestive photos of young girls, some who come from Lawrence, and it had an image of a scantily clad policewoman. "The language was obscene and some of the images were pretty raunchy - and that's certainly something we don't want to be associated with," Romero said. "Even if the site didn't have that kind of stuff, I still would have sought their dismissal because what they did violated department policy. You cannot create a Lawrence Police Department Web site without permission from the chief." "I apologize for any negativity that this has brought upon the Lawrence Police Department or the auxiliary. The actions of these two individual officers does not reflect the actions of our force," Jay Jackson said. "I do not think it was their intention for it to go this far. But as is the case with many types of these Web sites, it just got out of hand. They apologized that it actually went this far."