By Rocco Parascandola
Newsday
NEW YORK — There were a lot of things the training sergeant wanted to tell the rookies assigned to his precinct last year: how to interact with the public; how to secure a crime scene; how to ease tensions in a domestic dispute.
Before he did any of that, though, the sergeant recalled recently, he had delivered a sharp message to his young charges: “If you have a Facebook page or a MySpace account and you’ve got pictures on there posing with your gun or your girlfriend is wearing your uniform, get rid of them before I find them.”
The interaction was not part of any formal New York Police Department policy, but rather a lone supervisor looking to weed out officers whose judgment isn’t so good.
Now, however, the NYPD is for the first time formally reviewing the online lives of every recruit who wants to be a police officer. That means reviewing Facebook, MySpace and a host of other online social networks.
The NYPD initiative, which went into effect when the current Police Academy class was sworn in Jan. 8, comes at a fitting time. Rookie cop Christian Torres, arrested last month and charged with robbing a Sovereign Bank in Pennsylvania and a Sovereign branch in Manhattan twice, had a MySpace account that would make any NYPD investigator wince. The page, now private and accessible only to his friends, listed his profession as “Oink,” an apparent reference to “pig,” a derogatory term for police.
The page also had a cartoon about robbing banks and a video in which Torres is seen skating on a half-pipe ramp. The video, police sources said, struck Internal Affairs as the work of an immature man and not representative of the serious image the NYPD wants to project.
Oddly, Torres’ page and his alleged crimes were in sharp contrast to his reputation. He had been a model cadet, had attended an exclusive prep school and had never shown signs he was not fit for the NYPD, Commissioner Ray Kelly said after Torres’ Pennsylvania arrest.
Torres joined the Police Academy in 2007, before the NYPD was looking online for clues about a recruit’s makeup. But Kelly said the new initiative should provide those charged with investigating an applicant’s background another means of learning about the applicant. “We now look at MySpace and those sorts of, you might say, newly developing ways to get information, publicly available information,” Kelly said.
It was not clear whether anyone had been prevented from joining the current academy class because of an online profile.
Torres’ arrest came as the NYPD struggles to attract candidates for the job, largely because of the starting salary of $25,100.
Nassau police would not say whether they check the Internet as part of recruits’ background investigation. “It is not our practice to reveal how we conduct our investigations,” said spokesman Det. Michael Bitsko. Suffolk police did not return calls.
Staff writer Laura Rivera contributed to this story.
Copyright 2008 Newsday