The New York Police Department is investigating reports that computers at police headquarters in the city were used to make editing changes to Wikipedia pages containing articles about alleged NYPD brutality.
Hundreds of alterations to Wikipedia pages criticizing the conduct of the NYPD, most notably in three high-profile cases, were carried out by people with IP addresses at 1 Police Plaza,
according to Mediaite.com.
Citing a detailed report from Capital New York, the news site says that Wikipedia users from police HQ had made several changes to pages with articles on the deaths of Sean Bell and Eric Garner in New York City.
In one case, a user on an NYPD computer tried to have an entry titled "Sean Bell Shooting Incident" deleted. On his wedding day in 2008, Sean Bell, an unarmed black man, was shot multiple times by undercover officers and killed.
"He [Bell] was in the news for about two months, and now no one except Al Sharpton cares anymore. The police shoot people every day, and times with a lot more than 50 bullets," the user wrote on Wikipedia's internal "Articles for deletion" page.
Garner died last year when he was put in a chokehold by a police officer during his arrest.
After a grand jury had cleared police of any wrongdoing, a computer user made several edits to Garner's page.
The page that originally said "Garner raised both his arms in the air" was changed to "Garner flailed his arms about as he spoke," according to Capital New York.
Another page declared that Garner's face was pushed "into the sidewalk," but was altered to say that Garner's head was pushed "down into the sidewalk."
The sentence, "Garner, who was considerably larger than any of the officers, continued to struggle with them," was added to the description of the incident, Mediaite.com reported.
There were also changes about the NYPD's controversial "stop-and-frisk" policy, now banned, while entire sections of NYPD's Wikipedia pages were deleted altogether, including the one titled "Allegations of police misconduct and the Civilian Complaint Review Board."
Wikipedia allows users to make changes to their pages, as long as the edits are truthful. The site will sometimes ban IP addresses that make edits to their own pages.
Mediaite.com reported that an NYPD spokesman said the department intended to investigate the alterations.
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