" 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.