The N.Y.P.D. Misfires

Tuesday afternoon, the New York City Police Department asked people, on Twitter, to share photographs of themselves with members of the force. The tweet offered an example: two officers, a man and a woman, each with an arm around a smiling man, who was wearing a knit cap embroidered with the department’s shield. “Tweet us & tag it #myNYPD,” the department wrote. “It may be featured on our Facebook.” The responses abounded, and largely contained photographs of what looked like police brutality.

X content

This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.

It can be difficult to disentangle things that happen on Twitter from lighthearted entertainment, but, scrolling through the #myNYPD tweets and accompanying photographs, it’s harder not to marvel at what so many people are saying: New York City’s police department is widely viewed as an instrument of violence and the abuse of power, and has been for some time. One shows a woman who looks to be screaming, hands cuffed behind her back, being moved in one direction by one officer while another pulls her hair the other way with an outstretched arm. Another shows the bullet-ridden car in which Sean Bell was shot and killed by officers, in 2006. We don’t know what’s happening in every photograph, but the outpouring of anger tells us a lot. Rather than finding amusement in the department’s public-relations blunder, it’s a moment to take stock of the N.Y.P.D. that too many New Yorkers know.

The department responded on Tuesday night with a statement saying that it considered the Twitter effort successful, if, for nothing else, as a way to provide a space for New Yorkers to communicate their feelings about the city’s police officers. Still, it’s hard to imagine that the department intended for this social-media-outreach attempt to be one that would challenge it to change its standing among out-of-power New Yorkers.

New Yorkers’ experience of the N.Y.P.D. has been closely associated with the widely opposed stop-and-frisk program. It is, even after a courtroom decision last year that went against the department—and Mayor Bill de Blasio’s decision not to pursue an appeal—not a done deal: the tactics, not the policy itself, were ruled to be unconstitutional. Moreover, a major component of Judge Shira Scheindlin’s decision was the appointment of an independent monitor of police practices who is, now, only required to serve for three years. What is striking, though, is the breadth of ire that extends beyond stop-and-frisk. The police enjoyed a certain cultural dispensation right after 9/11. But that seems to have been squandered with, for example, a unit that, until it was disbanded just a week ago, conducted wide-reaching surveillance on Muslim-Americans in search of terrorists. In 2011, the department’s response to Occupy Wall Street showed us the ease with which officers can escalate to violence. In August, 2012, near the Empire State building, two officers shot nine bystanders while in pursuit of one man. A month earlier, in July, 2012, Michael Pena, a former police officer, was charged with sexually assaulting a teacher in the Bronx while threatening her with his service revolver. And, although it involved off-duty crimes, the baroque story of the would-be “Cannibal Cop” didn’t help. The list of high-profile cases involving violent, at times lethal, responses by N.Y.P.D. officers toward citizens encompasses an array of victims.

What the Twitter response also shows, though, is that a list of headlines is inadequate for fully grasping the everyday confrontations—or threat of such—that many New Yorkers face.

As easy as it is to say that we miss the real thing by merely taking to Twitter, it’s also too simple just to blame individual officers in the N.Y.P.D., many of whom are surely well intentioned and working hard. If the police department is an instrument of power, then someone—or some collection of people—holds the actual power. The high-profile breaches of civil rights and personal safety cannot be separated from the leadership under which those policies were instituted and advanced. In an interview last month, Bill Bratton, the N.Y.P.D.’s commissioner, conceded that, under the previous administration—Bloomberg and Kelly’s—stop-and-frisk had gone too far. It was bad for everyone. “Morale in this organization was awful. The public didn’t understand; politicians didn’t understand it,” he said. Perhaps, though, something is changing: “While the stops have been reduced by eighty or ninety per cent, crime is continuing to go down,” Bratton said.

As Mayor de Blasio has said, since before he was elected, ours is a city divided along economic lines. Perhaps #myNYPD has revealed something about that structure, and about all of us: it shows the diversity and abundance of people who are not in power. Confrontations with the police are not restricted to black-looking people and poor communities, as we are wont to assume. Economic and social divisions, and this thing called race, obscure the deeper truth that power compels the use of force—physical, financial, political, or otherwise.

A recent invocation of that reality is Kendrick Lamar’s 2012 album, “good kid m.A.A.d. city.” In it, Lamar adopts the characters of various dispossessed Americans. From the song “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst”:

I count lives,
all on these songs,
look at the weak, and cry,
pray one day you’ll be strong,
fighting for your rights—
even when you’re wrong—
and hope that at least one of you sing about me when I’m gone.
Am I worth it?

New York, keep posting your pictures. Keep singing.

Photograph by Mary Altaffer/AP.