NYPD Censors Wikipedia to Coverup Police Murder
March 18, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
From a reader:
I had read your article, “Wikipedia or WikiPIGia? Political Censorship of the Wikipedia Entries on Bob Avakian and the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA,” so I was particularly interested in a piece of investigative reporting that appeared on March 13, 2015 at capitalnewyork.com that revealed that “about a dozen” Internet IP addresses registered to the NYPD were used to make significant edits and/or deletions to Wikipedia pages for victims who had been murdered at the hands of NYPD pigs. These Wikipedia pages included the ones for Eric Garner, Sean Bell, and Amadou Diallo. The edits were made anonymously, but the IP addresses from which they originated were recorded in accordance with Wikipedia policy on anonymous edits and their sources traced by reporters for capitalnewyork.com.
The report exposes the following changes to the Wikipedia page titled “Death of Eric Garner”:
- “Garner raised both his arms in the air” was changed to “Garner flailed his arms about as he spoke.”
- “Use of the chokehold has been prohibited” was changed to “Use of the chokehold is legal, but has been prohibited.”
- 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.
According to the same article, just five months after NYPD pigs murdered Sean Bell, “a user on 1 Police Plaza’s network attempted to delete the Wikipedia entry ‘Sean Bell shooting incident’” writing on Wikipedia’s internal “Articles for deletion” page the following:
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. This incident is more news than notable.
There you have it right from 1 Police Plaza! These murderers think nothing of killing our youth time and time again! Nothing notable about that. Think about what they are saying here—the outrage and bragging police killing an unarmed Black man with impunity on the eve of his wedding.
The capitalnewyork.com article also reports that on several occasions, edits coming from NYPD IP addresses were made to the Wikipedia “Stop-and-frisk” entry in attempts to cover for their massive rampant terror program against Black and Latino youth. One edit cited by the article was [NYPD edits are bolded]:
“The stop-and-frisk program of New York City is a practice of the New York City Police Department to stop, question and, if the circumstances of the stop warrant it, conduct a frisk of the person stopped.” This was changed to “The stop-and-frisk program of New York City is a practice of the New York City Police Department by which a police officer who reasonably suspects a person has committed, is committing, or is about to commit a felony or a Penal Law misdemeanor, stops and questions that person, and, if the circumstances of the stop warrant it, conducts a frisk of the person stopped.”
These edits are likely just the tip of the iceberg of police and government intelligence agencies’ dirty work on Wikipedia. Little attempt was made by the NYPD in these edits to completely mask their hand. Here we get a glimpse of what they are doing in order to cover up and further this system’s program of suppression. And this makes it all the more clear that their systematic murder and brutality must STOP and along with it their overt and covert attempts to suppress resistance and the movement for revolution.
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