Tuesday, April 22, 2014

#myNYPD Twitter Campaign Backfires, Promotes Photos of Police Brutality Instead of Positive Encounters With Public 
Brooklyn residents rebelled in the aftermath of the police killing of Kimani Gray,
16, during March 2013.
On Tuesday the NYPD's Twitter page, @NYPDnews, asked users to tweet pictures of positive interactions between the public and city cops, and to use the hashtag #myNYPD. Instead, people posted pictures of police brutality that took place during the Occupy Wall Street movement.

BY THOMAS TRACY   NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Tuesday, April 22, 2014, 4:44 PM

The NYPD learned the hard way that #myNYPD is not necessarily #everyonesNYPD.

A seemingly innocuous request by NYPD officials to have Twitter users post happy pictures of themselves with city cops blew up in the department’s face on Tuesday when people instead began tweeting photos of police brutality.

“Do you have a photo w/ a member of the NYPD?” the department asked on its @NYPDnews Twitter page at 2 p.m. “Tweet us & tag it #myNYPD. It may be featured on our Facebook.”
Cops are now regretting that decision.

The hashtag quickly started trending on the Twitter-verse, quickly generating over 10,000 responses in the hour after 4pm., an overwhelming amount of which were negative. Many of the posts were photographic examples of the department’s heavy-handed treatment of Occupy Wall Street protesters in lower Manhattan in 2011. Some of the posted pictures show cops with billy clubs attacking rallying protestors.

Other pics show heavily armed police officers holding back protestors.

“These are the top pictures when you search the #myNYPD tag,” wrote Twitter user Chelsea D.

“You really didn’t think this through did you?”

Other Twitter users wrote funny captions for the violence-revealing pictures.

“The NYPD taking a quick break to enjoy the music and crowd surf,” user Yung DeGrassi wrote under a picture of a cop reaching over a barricade to grab an Occupy Wall Street protestor.

ttracy@nydailynews.com
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nypd-twitter-campaign-mynypd-backfires-article-1.1765159#ixzz2zffREqal

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