By Larry Celona
New York Post
NEW YORK, N.Y. — It’s a sign of the times.
The NYPD is requiring police recruits who have MySpace or Facebook pages to watch as an investigator sifts through their most private postings, The Post has learned.
The measure is designed to weed out would-be cops who litter their Web sites with violent or explicit imagery, racist rants and any other material deemed objectionable, a law-enforcement source said.
Applicants Processing Division officers are demanding any recruit with an account log on to their pages, even if those pages are private and not accessible to the public, the source said.
Without the applicant logging on, only a subpoena could get the NYPD that much access to the private Web pages.
The policy has successfully alerted the department to some decidedly unsavory would-be cops - including one whose pages included a picture of himself jokingly pointing a gun at his buddy.
“He said it was just his friend, but at that point the interviewer thought it best that he not join the New York City Police Department,” noted the source.
The online snooping goes well beyond the previously announced policy of Googling would-be cops and visiting them online in the publicly accessible pages of social-networking sites.
It makes investigators privy even to some of the most private postings of anyone who wants to be a cop, sources said.
There is no written policy on what is objectionable - investigators just know it when they see it, sources said.
The policy, which went into effect with the class that got sworn in last January, is a direct result of embarrassing disclosures of inappropriate online postings by cops and recruits.
Last summer, a rookie cop named Christian Torres was arrested and charged with twice robbing a Sovereign Bank in Manhattan, along with one in Pennsylvania.
Internal Affairs investigators discovered Torres had a MySpace page in which he posted cartoons about bank robberies and listed his profession as “Oink,” an apparent reference to police.
Other personal Web pages of would-be cops have surfaced that featured videos of violent police beatings, explicit photos involving police uniforms or gear, and snide or bigoted remarks.
The online scrutiny has successfully winnowed out some obviously inappropriate applicants - including a couple of recruits whose networking accounts included boasts of gang membership, or photos of the applicant sporting gang-related tattoos and making gang gestures, according to a retired Applicants Division investigator who asked not to be identified by name.
“They’re not looking to hire gang members,” he laughed.
Copyright 2009 New York Post