NYPD officers are being enrolled in Twitter school in an effort to teach cops about how to properly communicate with the public at large.
"I think the training is a good idea. A lot of COs are a bit older, so they might not know how. They may not realize the power or the damage one wrong message can do," an officer
told the New York Post this week.
The NYPD has given itself a few headaches this year by using social media poorly, and the new effort seeks to overcome past failures to gain the public trust and engage citizens.
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In April, one of the department's outreach campaigns asked locals to tweet a picture of themselves with their friendly neighborhood police officers, and use the hashtag #myNYPD. But instead of asking officers to take a selfie with them, citizens drudged up photo after photo of police officers brutalizing the people they're sworn to protect.
Just a few months later, Capt. Thomas Harnisch of the 25th Precinct, which includes Harlem, made an insensitive comment joking about a woman who was killed after falling on the subway tracks while using her iPad. He later retracted the comment and apologized.
The new Twitter classes aim to avoid future mistakes like these, and are already underway for many officers at John Jay College. The Post noted a flyer that was passed out to each student at the beginning of class that read "USE COMMON SENSE."
From there, the lesson becomes a bit more nuanced, with teachers training cops on how to post useful information to the social network.
"They want us to put info like street closures or bus diversions because of a street fair. Also info like an accident-prone location or a picture of the cop of the month," said one officer. "Public information stuff."
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