When the New York Police Department asked Twitter users on Tuesday to share their photographs with police officers, they were perhaps expecting a few feel-good neighborhood scenes or tourists with police horses in Times Square.
A few posted pictures of themselves with officers, smiling.
Most did not.
Almost immediately after the call went out from the department's official Twitter account, storms of users took the opportunity to instead attach some of the most unfavorable images of New York City officers that could be found on the Internet. And judging by the output on Tuesday, there are quite a few.
Officers holding down a photographer on the pavement and a white-shirted supervisor twisting an arm, among scores taken during Occupy Wall Street protests. An officer knocking a bicyclist to the ground during a Critical Mass protest ride, and another dancing provocatively with a barely clad paradegoer.
A dog being shot. Officers on trial, or sleeping in uniform on a subway train.
It was an embarrassing stumble for what has, in recent weeks, been an aggressive effort by the Police Department to engage with New Yorkers on social media, particularly on the short messaging service.
Five commanders around the city were deputized by the department to write their own Twitter messages and began doing so last week. So far, the posts have stuck to local information, smiling posed photographs and, on Sunday, a number of self-consciously cute pictures from an Easter egg hunt in Queens.
Commissioner William J. Bratton has been active on his own Twitter account for months. Relying on an officer from the department's communications team to write most of the messages, Mr. Bratton's account has included semiofficial messages - as in a series of posts from a closed-door meeting of top chiefs in January - and pictures that track his daily movements, whether at a recent set of gang arrests in the Bronx or during his visit to Boston on Monday.
The Police Department has in the past enjoyed some success with viral images that captured attention online, including of an officer seen giving a pair of boots to a homeless man in 2012.
'Do you have a photo w/a member of the NYPD?' read the department's message, sent on its official Twitter account, @NYPDnews. 'Tweet us & tag it #myNYPD. It may be featured on our Facebook.'
For a time on Tuesday, that hashtag, developed by the department's social media team, rose to the top 10 shared by Twitter users, not only in New York but around the world.
'Who would have thought #myNYPD wouldn't be what @NYPDNews thought it should be?' wrote Zeynep Tufekci, a fellow at Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy. 'Welcome to the 21st century, folks.'
A spokeswoman for the department, Deputy Chief Kim Y. Royster, said in a two-sentence statement Tuesday evening that the department was 'creating new ways to communicate effectively with the community' and that Twitter provided 'an open forum for an uncensored exchange' that is 'good for our city.'
The experience will not stop the department from pushing forward with social media endeavors, its top spokesman, Stephen Davis, said. 'You take the good with the bad,' he said.
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