On July 17, 2014, the New York Police Department put Staten Island resident Eric Garner into a chokehold while apprehending him for allegedly selling cigarettes illegally. Garner told police “I can’t breathe” 11 times before losing consciousness. Officers did not perform CPR on Garner, and neither did EMT when they arrived at the scene. Garner was pronounced dead in the hospital about an hour after the incident.

This week, exactly five years after Garner’s death, Mayor Bill de Blasio doubled down on his decision to not fire Officer Daniel Pantaleo, who placed Garner in a chokehold. Pantaleo will also not be held criminally liable. The decision ignores repeated demands for justice from local residents and activists who have organized both in-person and en masse on social media.

That same day, the NYPD Twitter account tweeted about World Emoji Day.

Motherboard has obtained and is publishing an internal guide that may help explain the strategy behind that tweet, and the NYPD's social media presence across platforms. Police are explicitly told to “be funny” by cracking jokes and using emojis, and to take “victory laps” by sharing evidence of arrests and confiscations. The documents note that the goal of NYPD social media accounts is to “build, and maintain trust between the Department and the communities it serves.”

The U.S. military, and police departments around the country, are known to follow a similar social media strategy. Law enforcement often uses social media to speak in a way that’s cheery and cutesy, belittling and heartless, or some combination of these things. The NYPD is no exception. In 2014, the NYPD tweeted a quote from A Few Good Men which, in the movie, was used to justify a murder. (They later deleted the tweet.) Earlier this year, it triumphantly tweeted about a “clean up” of a homeless encampment in the East Village.