Overview

#MYNYPD is a hashtag campaign launched by the New York Police Department as a community outreach program on Twitter. While intended as a feel-good social media event to boost the image of the NYPD, the hashtag stream quickly became flooed with photographs of its uniformed officers resorting to violence.

Background

At 1:55 p.m. (ET) on April 22nd, 2014, @NYPDNews^[1] tweeted a message calling on its followers to share their photographs with NYPD police officers using the hashtag #MyNYPD.

Notable Developments

The NYPD's community outreach hashtag was initially met with genuine responses from its followers on Twitter, but it soon turned into an all-day exhibition of images depicting police brutality and racial profiling, including many photographs that went viral during the height of Occupy Wall Street protests. According to Topsy^[2], the hashtag #MyNYPD was mentioned more than 180,000 times on April 22nd.

News Media Coverage

That afternoon, the hijacking of #MyNYPD on Twitter was reported on by The Daily Dot^[3], Gawker^[4], VICE^[5], The Verge^[6], Mediate^[7], Mashable^[8] and The Huffington Post^[10], as well as a number of local and national news outlets.^[9][12][13]

External References