NYPD Twitter SNAFU actually clever Internal Affairs intelligence gathering operation

On Tuesday the New York City Police Department announced on twitter a new community policing effort. The NYPD was asking people to tweet photos of citizen interactions with police using the tag #myNYPD. With in hours the twitter feed was filled with anti police photos.

An Image posted with the #myNYPD tag. (Image courtesy of Twitter)

An Image posted with the #myNYPD tag. (Image courtesy of Twitter)

Anti police activists saw this as a great opportunity to punk the NYPD. Members of these groups, and average police hating citizens, all started posting photos depicting incidents of police misconduct. Unbeknownst to the anti-police movement this was all planned for.

The #myNYPD hash tag was dreamed up by NYPD’s Internal Affairs division. The people working IA are police who investigate fellow officers on the department.

Inspector Carol Cox tells CallTheCops this is a way for IA to keep tabs on their officers via social media.

“We have a number of people who devote their time to keeping track of social media posts about NYPD. We are hoping to find out about misconduct going on that members of the public witness but do not report directly to us. Tracking down that kind of intelligence was taking too much time. So we figured we would make use of a tag to have that info come right to us.”

In the two days this hash tag has been active the IA division has been able to open eight new investigations. All of them involving police misconduct that was not reported to the department.

“We got the new guy just sitting there scrolling through the pictures. Many are photos from the Associated Press, so we already know about these incidents. But every so often he finds one that is an original. A few turned out to be officers from someplace other than NYPD. So far about two-dozen new misconduct incidents have been identified. Of that two-dozen we have identified eight of the officers, and initiated the investigation process.”

Union officials are outraged. None were willing to speak to CallTheCops until after an official statement has been drafted. The word “entrapment” was used in a few of our conversations with union members.

As for the IA division… They are extremely happy with this operation. The public seems to think this is a major mistake, yet in reality the public is doing exactly what had been planned for.

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The staff at the CallTheCops are all people who now or at one time did work as police, firefighters, in EMS and even dispatch.