New York cops’ Twitter campaign backfires with ‘police brutality’ pics

A hashtag campaign started by the New York City Police Department has backfired after being inundated with photos of police brutality submitted via Twitter.


The NYPD sent a tweet on Tuesday, saying it might feature the photographs on its Facebook page.
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.


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.


There were a few instances where respondents did send in the type of police-friendly photographs officials were hoping to get. JP Quinn, 40, tweeted a picture from inside the old Yankee Stadium with his brother Michael, 38, who is a detective in Brooklyn South.
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.