A female Fort Worth police officer threatened to arrest a Christian evangelist for "offensive speech" at a Pride festival. The crime: preaching on a public sidewalk.

This happened in Texas. Fort Worth, Texas.

The Fort Worth Police Department has now been caught doing this at Pride events for two consecutive years — officers acting as de facto private security for the festival, shutting down constitutionally protected speech because someone in the crowd found it uncomfortable. The incidents drew national attention and legal threats, and this week the Fort Worth Police Chief finally addressed it. First off here's what happened with police:

"When we're right, we're right. And when we're wrong, we're wrong," the chief said. "And there certainly was a better way to have that communication. We were wrong in the manner in which we communicated that."

Note the careful framing. They were wrong "in the manner in which we communicated." Not wrong for telling a citizen he couldn't speak. Wrong for how they told him he couldn't speak. That's the kind of apology you get from someone whose lawyer edited the statement.

"Certainly we're going to take accountability for it," he added.

The accountability in question: mandatory First Amendment training for the entire Fort Worth police force. No officers were fired. No officers were suspended. No officers were reprimanded. The cop who threatened to arrest someone for exercising a constitutional right on a public sidewalk is presumably still on duty.

So the "accountability" is a training seminar.

The officers weren't confused about some obscure legal technicality. The First Amendment isn't buried in subsection C of an administrative code. It's the first one. It's the one you learn in middle school. A Fort Worth police officer looked at a man speaking words on a public sidewalk and decided those words were illegal because they were "offensive."

That's not a training gap. That's an officer enforcing a blasphemy code that doesn't exist in American law — and a department that let it happen two years running.

The legal reality is straightforward. Speech on a public sidewalk is protected. Speech that offends people at a public event is protected. A police officer's personal opinion about whether the speech is appropriate is constitutionally irrelevant. This has been settled law for decades.

What made this worse was the pattern. Year one, officers shut down a Christian preacher at the Pride festival. Year two, it happened again. The department had twelve months to review the policy, retrain the officers, or simply remind them that the Constitution applies even when the speech is unpopular. They didn't.

It took national media coverage and the threat of legal action to produce a press conference where the chief acknowledged — in the most passive language available — that his officers violated someone's rights.

Imagine being a police chief in Texas and needing a mandatory department-wide refresher on the First Amendment. Not because of some novel legal question. Because your officers keep arresting people for talking.