NYPD cop in hot water over ‘Black Lives Matter’ post
Police Officer Gwendolyn Bishop, a Brooklyn police officer, is in hot water with the NYPD after responding with #BlackLivesMatter to a post on the department’s Twitter feed.
According to the New York Daily News, Bishop responded to a post from February 2016 about a gun arrest using her own personal Twitter account, writing, “Sad day for the 76th Pct. #Blacklivesmatter.”
The reply was made under the account @ducklipzanddimplzz, which has since been taken down. According to her attorney, John Tynan, she was not in violation of department rules, since she was not using the department Twitter account but was responding through her personal account as any other person on Twitter is allowed to do. What’s more, Tynan said, her Twitter account did not identify her as a cop.
Bishop has also claimed that she did not mean to reply with #Blacklivesmatter but with #Bluelivesmatter and that her phone auto-corrected her post. Tynan noted that she had posted the comment three times and that two of them used the #bluelivesmatter hashtag.
Bishop said that she was not directly responding to the gun arrest in her post.
“I vaguely remember the tweets,” she told Commissioner David Weisel. “If I had to guess, there were a lot of changes in my precinct about shifts being switched, but it had nothing to do about this gun arrest.”
If Bishop is found to be in violation of department rules, she could lose up to 30 vacation days and could be put on probation for up to a year.
