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When the New York police department invited people to tweet pictures of
their dealings with "New York's finest" with the hashtag
The attempt at public outreach, however, backfired spectacularly when
users flooded Twitter with hundreds of photos of police brutality during
Occupy Wall Street, one of an 84-year-old man brutali
By midnight on Tuesday, more than 70,000 people had tweeted about
police brutality, ridiculing the NYPD for a social media disaster and
recalling the names of people shot dead by police.
Police officials
declined to respond to questions about the comments, which were being
posted at a rate of 10,000 an hour, or say who was behind the Twitter
idea. But they did release a short statement.
"The NYPD is
creating new ways to communicate effectively with the community," Kim
Royster, an NYPD spokeswoman told the New York Daily News. "Twitter
provides an open forum for an uncensored exchange and this is an open
dialogue good for our city."
The request for pictures, on the
@NYPDNews Twitter page, had said: "Do you have a photo w/ a member of
the NYPD? Tweet us & tag it #myNYPD," the message read. "It may be
featured on our Facebook."
It prompted a flood pictures of
officers mistreating people and old newspaper headlines about unarmed
people being shot dead by police. It also sparked similar hashtag trends
– including
#myLAPD – and attracted international attention.
Not all the posts were negative. JP Quinn, 40, tweeted a picture from
inside the old Yankee Stadium with his brother Michael, 38, who is a
detective in Brooklyn South. "I like when they make public efforts like
this. It's a shame that it blew up like this," Quinn told the Daily
News. "I just assumed it would be all roses, like whoever came up with
that for the NYPD."
The NYPD tried to make the best of a botched job by retweeting all the favourable photos.
Last year, Wall Street giant JP Morgan was at the centre of a social
media storm when it invited Twitter users to send questions to an
executive using the hashtag
#AskJPM.
The bank was deluged with vitriol. More than 8,000 responses were sent
within a six-hour period, two-thirds of which were negative.
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