I did not intend my posts to be of the "here is what is actually going on" variety. My concern is that I have seen no attempt in the article or (at the time of my original posting) in the comments even addressing the possibility that this is non-malicious. As the article is making a claim it has a burden of proof that, in my opinion, it has not even come close to meeting.

As a direct response to my concerns, you have actually addressed some these fundamental concerns that should have been dealt with in the original article article allowing me, as an untrained lay-person in this matter, to take this case much more seriously.

I am still not convinced that this is an instance of policy and not individual incentives, but answering that would involve reasearch into many cases, their incentive structure, comparrisons to other groups, ETC, and would need to be written up into a long and in depth article which would get fewer readers and less invigorate the base as these shorter and less logically compelling pieces. I realize that this is a fundemental problem with any type of activism, and the only solution I know of is to call it out and hope that A) someone will provide the information in comments, B) authors will tend to include (or reference) more information in the original article, and C) other people will that these articles may not show what they think they do.

" As the article is making a claim it has a burden of proof that, in my opinion, it has not even come close to meeting."

The NYPD has a long history of doing this, not only shown on this site, but others. It's actually quite bad.

Here's another few examples

http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/the-nypd-is-foia-proof,

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/03/ap-nypd-matt-apuzzo...

etc

Muckrock has enough history requesting things from the NYPD that they are probably tired of writing up the same case of this maliciousness, again and again.