NYPD Twitter campaign backfires, thousands of negative tweets
NEW YORK Wed Apr 23, 2014 3:18pm EDT
A pedestrian walks past a line of New York Police Department (NYPD) cars parked at Times Square in New York, October 18, 2011.
Credit: Reuters/Gary Hershorn
(Reuters)
- A New York Police Department campaign to burnish its image via social
media instead produced a flood of pictures of apparent police brutality
and tweets critical of the force being shared at a rate of thousands an
hour.
Police Commissioner Bill Bratton said on Wednesday he would
continue and expand the NYPD Twitter campaign a day after it backfired,
triggering an outpouring of negative images including police violence
at New York's Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, an NYPD officer
pointing a gun at a dog, and an officer asleep in a subway car.
"The
reality of policing is that oftentimes our actions are lawful, but they
look awful," Bratton told a news briefing at New York City Hall.
"Most
of those photos that I looked at are old news," said Bratton, appointed
by Mayor Bill de Blasio to take over from Ray Kelly, who served for 12
years under de Blasio's predecessor, Michael Bloomberg.
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This
file photo, from May 2012, shows a police lieutenant swinging his baton
at Occupy Wall Street activists in New York. It was recirculated
Tuesday in response to a police hashtag that went awry. (Mary
Altaffer/AP)
The New York Police Department’s attempt at
using social media to connect with constituents on Tuesday went…well,
let’s say awry.
An
initial tweet asked people to post photos of themselves with police officers along with the hashtag
#myNYPD. Obviously this went poorly, because
obviously
it was going to go poorly, because these things can really only go
poorly (we’ll get back to that in a moment). In response, people sent in
lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of photos
of New York police officers doing violent things to people. (Like the
photo at the top of this post. It’s almost two years old, but thanks to
the #myNYPD hashtag, it
has been everywhere over the last 24 hours.)
William J. Bratton, the police commissioner, said
he isn’t too bothered by the reaction:
“I
kind of welcome the attention,” Bratton said Wednesday as the negative
tweets kept coming nearly 24 hours after cops invited the
cyber-submissions….
“Most of the pictures I looked at, they’re old
news,” Bratton said, tossing previous NYPD administrations under the
patrol car. “They’ve been out there for a long time.”
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