The NYPD’s public image campaign on twitter didn’t exactly succeed.
I really hope the NYPD isn’t as bad as the anecdotal evidence suggests:
A New York Police Department campaign to burnish its image via social media instead produced a flood of pictures of police brutality and tweets critical of the force being shared at a rate of thousands an hour…The tweets included images of violence from New York’s Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, pictures of an NYPD officer pointing a gun at a dog, and an officer asleep in a subway car.
Images and tweets also referred to the fatal, controversial New York police shootings of Sean Bell in 1999 and Amadou Diallo in 1999, each of which led to criminal trials in which all the officers were acquitted.
Granted, the social media thing is a little hard to read. You’re dealing with the people who have a strong opinion, which is not the general public. At least not necessarily the general public.
In any case I give credit to the department for resilience in the face of the torrent, though this might seem a bit pollyanna-ish:
After the campaign appeared to backfire, the department issued a two-sentence statement saying that it was “creating new ways to communicate effectively with the community.”
“Twitter provides an open forum for an uncensored exchange and this is an open dialogue good for our city,” the statement said.
Sure. I feel you.
But I can’t help but wonder if this social media incident is on the cutting edge, such that the perspectives of many of the players in the system – such as we just noted with federal Judge Kopf – have a lot of catching up to do.
But then again we also know, or at least have inferred, that there’s movement afoot. Does change come from the top down or the bottom up? Or is that a simplistic question anyway? Maybe it’s just in the ether, or it’s a weltgeist.
Does the future belong to the twitter community, or to Judge Kopf? Either way, it’s an interesting time right now in the law world, n’est-ce pas?
Lawyers on Strike 