How Will They Pay in Peoria?

It's a question the city of Peoria, IL (or at least its insurance carrier) is probably going to have to answer soon, as the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois announced Monday that it's going to talk to Peoria city officials (or at least their lawyers) about a little recent city business, and it wants to hold that talk in front of a judge.

Someone found a fake Twitter account using the name and photo of the mayor of Peoria. When city officials learned of it, they tried to get Twitter to take it down. Twitter allows for parody accounts (perhaps recognizing the superficiality of its actual accounts) and didn't move as fast or as far on the request as Peoria and its mayor wanted.

So the city got its police department involved, eventually raiding a house, confiscating computers and phones, holding people for questioning and charging a guy whose name was on the internet account that had been used to set up the fake Twitter feed with possession of marijuana. Which he apparently did have. But he had not set up the fake feed; that was on another person picked up from work after the house was raided. That's the fellow on whose behalf the Illinois ACLU would like to have its sit-down with city officials, in the presence of the aforesaid judge and possibly a dozen of the city officials' peers.

I'm thinking it doesn't get that far, and the conversation between the lawyers of the different parties is going to be mostly numerical, interspersed with phrases like "How much do you want?" and "How much do you got?" and "I think my sofa would look really good in the mayor's office."