The mystery of the National Police Association: why is it mass-blocking furries?

by Patch O'Furr

It came up so randomly.

Some say the fans of My Little Pony are furries, because the colorful ponies are talking animals. What about members of a certain profession? What if they’re pink with hooves, blue uniforms, and lots of them think white is the best color… those are the colors of a certain Pride flag, but I suspect the similarity ends there.

We could ask the National Police Association if it has any furries, but it isn’t talking to us.

On December 27, Twitter user @EnnexTheFox first noticed being blocked. Lots of puzzled furries chimed in to say they were blocked too. 90 minutes later, @satansmoustache blew it up with the (currently) highest-seen post about the organization which seems to officially represent police.

Only it doesn’t. So why is it blocking? The answer may come from the way it gets people to blow things up.

Lots of speculation, and some answers.

As Twitter shows, people can run away with their own stories. A little research finds some facts in Indiana news from 2019.

(IndyStar: This Indianapolis charity says it helps police. Police chiefs say it’s a scam.)

  • People in many states got sensational letters about crime to raise donations — the fearmongering almost sounds like a protection racket!
  • Donation money didn’t go to police, it went to a newly registered nonprofit that police didn’t know about.
  • Police departments in four states issued “scam alerts” for misleading messages.
  • IndyStar: “The National Police Association, which was formed in 2017, is not a membership organization. Its only physical presence is a P.O. Box in Indianapolis. With no paid staff, the nonprofit is run by three volunteers.”
  • The nonprofit’s treasurer: “The NPA utilizes a third-party company to conduct fundraising”.
  • Direct Response Consulting Services does mail and “email marketing, web, social media, and telemarketing”.
  • The funds seemed to be intended for crime prevention, but went to politics.

This leads me to some observations.

(1) This organization heavily relies on marketing service because they make hundreds of thousands in donations from it.
(2) The Twitter isn’t run by police looking at protests, it’s run by social media managers looking at engagement.
(3) Marketing may use mass-blocking for anything that doesn’t suit good P.R.
(4) Somehow a lot of furries ended up on a commercially used list.
(5) Remember Tony the Tiger? In 2016, he mass-blocked furries because they kept asking for his “cummies”.

Yeah, I’d go out on a limb and say this whole thing isn’t because police don’t like furries. That may be projecting more awareness than there is.

It’s more likely because furries are highly active for… not the most corporate-friendly reasons. It’s not activity that would raise donations to police, and it might lower them. (Besides P.R. or harassment concern, an A.I. sorted list could tie furries with #BLM and far-left activism even if the marketers don’t know it.)

Now, for other animals, furries donate millions in charity.

There’s one thing that the news didn’t notice about The National Police Association that perked up my ears. IndyStar said the new org was registered in 2017 (and Guidestar confirms it). But they joined Twitter in 2010. Or at least, an account was made under some name, and who knows what exchanges were made?

No matter how many furries are blocked, they may be a tiny percent of 96.9K followers, and the NPA surely has a lot going on that we don’t see.

UPDATES:

Learn more from this 2019 Alternet article: Here’s the truth behind the ‘National Police Association’—and its shady ideology

Far from being any kind of “national police association,” the NPA is just another arm of the self-benefiting criminal justice lobby that perpetuates fear through deliberate mischaracterizations of crime.

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