Spend 20 minutes on social media and you’ll think the most popular club in high school is debate team. People online can debate anything. Well, maybe “debate” is the wrong word. Debate is reasoned and measured. Not so much in the comments sections, however. There, people will argue and complain about anything online.
Sometimes that will even spill over into real life. Just witness what happened with one town’s police cruisers!
Laguna Beach, California is a quiet, scenic coastal town known for its natural beauty, seaside resorts, and local artist community.
And with a population that doesn’t even break 25,000, it’s not the most fast-paced place, either. It’s a leisurely, relaxed kind of a place. But that doesn’t mean that folks there lack passion.
In fact, their passions came bubbling to the surface after their town’s police cruisers got a new paint job.
Like so many debates, it started with a tweet.
The Laguna Beach Police Department used Twitter to show off their new ride’s fresh look. Online, the reaction to the American flag theme on the lettering seemed to be pretty positive.
“Congratulations! They look fantastic!!!!” wrote one person.
“Those look waaay better!” wrote another.
However, Laguna Beach’s City Council wasn’t so sure about the new graphics.
Specifically, they weren’t quite what the city ordered. While yes, the flag look was intended, the colors weren’t suppose to be so bright.
“Clearly, the way it looks on the car is not what anyone expected it to be,” Mayor Pro Tem Steve Dicterow told the L.A. Times . “I think it’s reasonable that we’re going to look at it again so that whatever we approved is exactly what we put on the car.”
However, the brightness of the colors wasn’t exactly stirring the debate outside the council chambers.
Dicterow also told the L.A. Times that he had received about a dozen emails from locals who did not like the new look of the police cruisers.
“Some of the words people used was that they felt it was threatening, intimidating, harassing and a symbol of racism,” he said.
At a city council meeting, one local artist used the word “aggressive” to describe the paint job.
The daughter of military parents, she received quite the backlash for her comment, and later explained in further detail to the L.A. Times , saying “I don’t really care too much about the design, other than what I said — it’s bad art. I’m being attacked for that because the narrative feeds a fire of division, which is what our culture has become.”
A local designer expressed similar concerns.
“When one of them’s there, it works,” he told MSN . “But all of a sudden, I saw, wow, when there are three, maybe four of them together, folks thought it was a SWAT team, federal agents. So it had a very striking, strong impact, so much so that I think there might be unintended consequences.”
That said, the new design has plenty of fans.
One local attorney made her opinion known at a council meeting, calling the cruisers “exceptional” and raising the specter of the Oval Office.
“They are so filled with hatred toward this…office of the president of the United States and the current occupant of that office,” she said, according to the L.A. Times , “that they cannot see through their current biases to realize that a police vehicle with the American flag is the ultimate American expression.”
The police themselves, who have to drive these vehicles every day, say they’ve heard nothing but support.
“Every time I came to a stop sign, every time I came to a red light, somebody is telling me the car looks great,” said Corporal Ryan Hotchkiss at the council meeting. “Every one of our members that drives the car loves it, and we look forward to keeping them the way they are.”
h/t L.A. Times
