Slashdot Mirror
NYPD's Twitter Campaign Backfires
An anonymous reader writes "A NYPD community outreach campaign designed to show images of citizens with cops turned ugly quickly when a deluge of images depicting police brutality came in. From the article: 'The responses soon turned ugly when Occupy Wall Street tweeted a photograph of cops battling protesters with the caption "changing hearts and minds one baton at a time." Other photos included an elderly man bloodied after being arrested for jaywalking.' Police Commissioner Bill Bratton says, 'I kind of welcome the attention,' of the #myNYPD project."
There was and will be none, because at least 70-80% of the population of NY was cheering the police on when they busted up OWS, and seeing those images again probably makes them happy.
Nooo... because 99% of those images lack context of a situation where force was justified. Do some ride-alongs with cops and see the entire story.
Good cop story: I was accosted by four cops in squad cars one night in Tucson about midnight. I'd gotten hungry and decided to go to the local burrito joint. I wanted to read while I was there, so I took my netbook. It was cold, so I jogged the few blocks to the Taco Shop.
'Course, the cops see a guy running down the road with a laptop, and go "huh, we'd better see what the hell is going on here."
Cop says "Eh, what're you doing?" I tell him I'm headed to the Taco Shop for a burrito, and ask him what the problem is. He says "Is that your computer?" I tell him "Yeah ... now that I think about it, I do look suspicious, I guess. Look, can I boot the thing and show you documents with my name on them, and that it matches my driver's license?"
The cop tells me to go ahead, so I do. He says "Well, looks like it's your computer -- have a nice night" and they leave me alone.
Unfortunately, in a lot of places trying to do what I did (talk to the cops, rather than say "I do not consent to any searches and would like a lawyer") ends badly. But Tucson PD is pretty relaxed. I just wish police in more places could be trusted to treat citizens like citizens rather than "criminals they haven't caught yet"; I imagine they'd be better at preventing crime if they did.
(For those not well-versed in Arizona geopolitics: the place with the out-of-control xenophobic sheriff is Phoenix, north of Tucson. There Hispanics are regularly harassed by the police. In Tucson a big chunk of the police *are* Hispanic; it's a city that is far more tolerant.)