• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, December 5, 2014

Long held up as a model for big city law enforcement in the U.S. and abroad, this week the New York City Police Department finds itself making headlines around the world for the wrong reason -- the controversy surrounding the decision of a grand jury not to indict the police officer who killed an African-American man, Eric Garner, after placing him in a chokehold last summer.

Coming close on the heels of another grand jury decision not to indict a policeman involved in a fatal shooting in Ferguson, MO, the Garner case has crystallized the still troubled relations between law enforcement and the African-American community. As protests continue in New York and across the U.S., the NYPD faces calls for reform and doubts about its ability to maintain public trust.

Although these are obviously complicated issues that will require a multifaceted response, probably extending over many years, from a public relations perspective one question is how (or more accurately, whether) the NYPD can use social media to repair some of the damage done to its image and win back public opinion.

No question it’s a tall order, and not just because of the current controversy. The main obstacle is the simple fact that most people have somewhat ambivalent feelings about the police to begin with, reflecting their status as the sharp edge of the state, uniquely empowered to use violence and detain citizens as they maintain order. Thus most people have encountered the police in both helpful and adversarial roles -- say, helping catch a thief versus responding to a neighbor’s noise complaint about your rowdy party.

As glad as we are to see the police in the first context, seeing them in the second context is inevitably an intimidating and unpleasant experience; so is getting a traffic ticket or a citation for having an open container in public. Even in friendly interactions, you can’t ignore the fact that you are talking to a person with a gun displayed in plain sight, and the right to use it in certain circumstances. In short, while the police exist to serve the public, their authority rests on an implicit threat of violence that every individual must be aware of at some level.

As a result the challenges posed by social media are different for police than any other institution, whether it be a business or some other “civilian” branch of the government. Social media is egalitarian by its nature, giving everyone the same opportunity to express themselves, and superficially this appears to be true here as well: anyone can tweet at the police and probably get a tweet in response. But the power dynamic between police and the public is inherently uneven, for the reasons stated above, and that definitely constrains their ability to use social media to communicate.  

For example, a common theme of the NYPD’s social media efforts to date has been an effort to “humanize” the police, apparently on the assumption that making police officers “relatable” will somehow make the public more sympathetic to them. But it just doesn’t work, because they can’t persuade the public to ignore the elephant in the room: actually, police officers really aren’t like the rest of us because of their unique status as practitioners of state-sanctioned violence. And no amount of social media interaction will change that.

The “#MyNYPD” Twitter debacle is a good example: it probably seemed like a bright idea, encouraging Twitter users to post photos and share stories about themselves having friendly encounters with police officers. The whole effort was based on a presumption of goodwill from the public, and there was certainly some on display: a good number of Twitter users “played along” with nice photos and comments showing how much they like the police. But these positive responses were quickly drowned out by a much larger hostile outpouring, as other Twitter users complained about police brutality and generally showed their dislike and distrust.

The response was predictable because what the NYPD was trying to do was, in effect, impossible: it was inviting the public to relate to the police as equals even though they are not. The contradiction is exemplified by the hashtag #MyNYPD, which sounds like an attempt to tap into the faux-personalization trend in corporate customer service, almost seeming to suggest that the police are some sort of personal concierge service -- when in fact they are no such thing. At the same time, by acknowledging public “ownership” of the police, the hashtag invited users to appropriate it for their own ends. Asked to share their views of the police, they did -- and it was not a pretty picture.

The latest NYPD Twitter push, in response to the Garner controversy, makes the same mistake. This time the NYPD’s social team tried to show that the police are aware of and heeding public criticism with tweets using the hashtag #WeHearYou. The hashtag is another attempt to put the police and public on an equal footing, having an open dialogue without fear or intimidation, when many members of the public clearly believe that is precisely what is not happening. Inevitably many users took this an invitation to point out that the police did not in fact hear Eric Garner, who is heard on video saying “I can’t breathe” in a police chokehold.

So can the NYPD use social media to manage its image without constantly setting itself up for embarrassing blowback?  Conventional wisdom holds that they have to at least try, because otherwise they will simply cede the territory to their critics, but it’s pretty clear that conventional social media tactics aren’t going to work. Should they give up on the friendly approach, acknowledge the power dynamic and stick to stiff formality? Or will that just make things worse? I’d be interested to hear what readers think.