In case you missed the viral tweets from the official Bloomington Police twitter account (@BPD_MN), here's a recap of what happened and why it's important to address.
On Friday, July 2nd, Bloomington PD tweeted a photo of two police officers standing with a LFL steward and a restocked LFL with the caption, "After some thefts from little libraries in our city, officers and staff came together to donate a bunch of books to the libraries. Now people can use and enjoy them again!" As you might imagine, people were quick to go on the offense, pointing out that one cannot steal from a Little FREE Library. A couple hours later, BPD tweeted again with an explanation that entirely missed its mark: "An individual was taking every book from the libraries. It is common that they are then sold for profit which is not the intent for the libraries." It took an additional two hours before the official Twitter account issued an apology tweet: "Regrettably, in our previous post we used the word theft to describe books being taken from a free library. We did not investigate this as a theft nor take a report. We simply responded by donating books that our BPD staff brought from home. A human error. Have a safe weekend."
In this episode, I read some of the responses by the public that are both insightful and hilarious. Besides a misuse of wording, though, Twitter user Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcpdd) links to the following article, which shines light on the more monetary and less literacy-advocacy side of the Little Free Libraries non-profit organization.
Schmidt, J., & Hale, J. (2017). Little Free Libraries: Interrogating the impact of the branded book exchange. Journal of Radical Librarianship, 3. https://journal.radicallibrarianship.org/index.php/journal/article/view/17