OPINION |
By Christian Schneider
Deputy Dogg is the name used by one or more anonymous people posting on X, often targeting Monterey County Sheriff Tina Nieto, members of the Board of Supervisors and others from behind a mask rather than attaching a real name to serious accusations.
That matters because for me this is not abstract and not new. I have lived through this tactic before. I have seen anonymous or disguised voices within the world of law enforcement used to accuse, threaten, harass and coerce me and others.
That goes to the heart of a lawsuit that has already cost Monterey County taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars. In the 2018 election, an anonymous email account was used to falsely accuse me and others of crimes, and Monterey County Weekly treated those accusations as credible enough to use in connection with the sheriff’s political campaign that year. The Weekly has also quoted recent missives from Deputy Dogg.
Then, in 2021, there was the “Mike Spavitz” episode, which was not harmless noise. It involved threats from anonymous law enforcement officials using that pseudonym. They were serious enough to cause real psychological harm and were aimed at stopping a recall campaign while interfering with my defamation lawsuit against three sheriff’s commanders. By the time I stood in court on July 21, 2023, I was not imagining a hypothetical danger. I was trying to warn others about a tactic used against me more than once.
I warned Judge Thomas Wills that discovery-related information could be weaponized through anonymous social media accounts to embarrass, target or attack people connected to the case. The Deputy Dogg Twitter account first appeared that day.
Six days later, on July 27, I sent a cease and desist to Monterey County and the Fenton & Keller law firm. Months later, I sent another letter reminding them that I had already put them on notice and describing the account as part of the same pattern of disparagement and intimidation. I said it in court, and I put it in writing.
Deputy Dogg did not appear in a vacuum. It showed up after I had lived through anonymous accusations in 2018 and disguised threats in 2021. That is why I do not see it as some odd local novelty worthy of normalization by the media or anyone else. I see it as part of a pattern.
When someone speaks as if they are police, the public should know who is speaking, by what authority, and under what rules. Without that, the badge becomes a costume.
What makes Deputy Dogg especially dangerous is that it presents itself as the work of a deputy or deputies inside the Monterey County Sheriff’s Office. It uses insider knowledge, government documents, and the posture of official access to make its claims feel credible. It borrows the authority of law enforcement while accepting none of the accountability.
That is a serious problem.
When someone speaks as if they are police, the public should know who is speaking, by what authority, and under what rules. Without that, the badge becomes a costume. The public cannot tell whether it is looking at official information, selective leaking, factional infighting, personal vendetta or covert intimidation.
That is why anonymous police-style accounts, increasingly popular in other jurisdictions as well, are so corrosive. They do not just insult people. They pressure them. They create an atmosphere in which people understand they can be watched, mocked, exposed, accused or publicly degraded at any time. They teach witnesses to stay quiet. They teach victims that coming forward may make them the next target. They teach the public to accept intimidation as part of civic life.
That hurts the community. It also hurts honest officers. The public does not neatly separate one anonymous police-style actor from the institution itself. If someone can present as a deputy online, use insider knowledge, and make criminal accusations from cover, trust in the department erodes. Good deputies inherit suspicion they did not earn. Legitimate communication becomes harder to believe. Real accountability becomes harder to distinguish from manipulation.
It can also become a Brady problem, a reference to a mostly confidential official list of law enforcement officers known to be dishonest. If an officer, or someone functioning with officer-like access, operates anonymously to make accusations, show bias, traffic in selective disclosures, or demonstrate dishonesty, that does not stay confined to social media. It raises credibility issues that can hamper otherwise legitimate prosecutions. It raises impeachment issues. It raises the question of whether that person can testify credibly, swear out affidavits credibly, or participate in investigations without disclosure consequences. Department of Justice guidance treats potential impeachment information as including conduct bearing on a law-enforcement witness’s truthfulness, bias or integrity.
Last year, a local media outlet reduced Deputy Dogg’s work to simply referring to the sheriff as “Tuna” rather than Tina and making “more playground insults.” That is not a small choice. It makes the account sound childish when the real issue is serious. Deputy Dogg traffics in anti-LGBTQ, discriminatory, misogynistic and other degrading attacks while presenting itself as law enforcement-adjacent and using insider knowledge and government material to build credibility. Reducing that to playground behavior sanitizes it. It makes something threatening sound juvenile.
That is how normalization works. Not through open endorsement, but through casual treatment. Through minimizing. Through treating something that should raise alarms as just another quirky part of local life.
It is not quirky. It is not harmless. And it is not new.
Anonymous accounts that present themselves as part of law enforcement are not colorful curiosities. They are dangerous. And when the press treats them as usable sources instead of warning signs, it does not merely report the harm. It helps normalize it.
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