The NYPD Bashtag – A lesson in social media
Last night (Tuesday) a STATter911.com post from almost two-years-ago started getting a lot of page views. The traffic was coming from Twitter. In fact, other than a breaking news story, it probably brought in as much traffic via Twitter than I’ve seen from any of my stories. Checking further I tracked it to this tweet:
It’s a story I ran on August 12, 2012 about a crowd being outraged over an NYPD officer shooting a pit bull. I ran the story because I thought it was interesting that all of the focus was on the animal but no one seemed at all concerned about the seizure the owner of the pit bull was having.
The image and story were among many being used to turn a hashtag into a bashtag. It started Tuesday afternoon after those running social media for NYPD encouraged people to tweet a favorite photo of an NYPD officer with the hastag #myNYPD.
This PR campaign trended very quickly on Twitter but not in the way the police brass intended. It also got a lot of news coverage (it even prompted a gallery of the negative tweets to be posted at Russia Today).
Matthew McKnight, NewYorker.com:
It can be difficult to disentangle things that happen on Twitter from lighthearted entertainment, but, scrolling through the #myNYPD tweets and accompanying photographs, it’s harder not to marvel at what so many people are saying: New York City’s police department is widely viewed as an instrument of violence and the abuse of power, and has been for some time. One shows a woman who looks to be screaming, hands cuffed behind her back, being moved in one direction by one officer while another pulls her hair the other way with an outstretched arm. Another shows the bullet-ridden car in which Sean Bell was shot and killed by officers, in 2006. We don’t know what’s happening in every photograph, but the outpouring of anger tells us a lot.
CNN:
Similar hashtags sprang up around the country, with #MyLAPD, #MyCPD and #MyAPD among those trending Wednesday morning. In a tweet that showed a Chicago police officer who appeared ready to punch someone with a camera, @70torinoman quipped, “#myCPD extending his fist out to the community.”
The tag #MyAPD referred to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where a Justice Department report recently blasted what it called a long history of police brutality and unnecessary deadly force.
But a New York police spokeswoman defended the campaign despite the backlash.
“The NYPD is creating new ways to communicate effectively with the community. Twitter provides an open forum for an uncensored exchange and this is an open dialogue good for our city,” said Deputy Chief Kim Y. Royster.
AP:
Anthony Rotolo, a professor of digital communications at Syracuse University, suggested another appropriate response could have been #SMH — shake my head.
“A lot of time the eagerness to embrace social media tools overshadows our common sense,” Rololo said. “In other types of media, we would not so quickly jump to something like this without doing our groundwork first.”
Still, there was some evidence Wednesday that the outreach may bear fruit.
One person posted a photo of herself standing next to an officer on horseback in Times Square. Another posted a picture of two smiling officers on patrol and wrote, “These guys put their lives on the line every day. They deserve our respect and gratitude.”
This is once again a reminder that social media is very much a double-edged sword. But it is good to read that NYPD says it isn’t backing down from using Twitter to communicate. Still it’s a lesson for all of us in the power of social media. A power that you can’t expect to control.
