The Plain View Project (PVP), a cop watch group disguised as a reputable research organization, analyzed the Facebook accounts of thousands of police officers across eight U.S. cities, including Philadelphia, Dallas, St. Louis, Phoenix, York, PA, Twin Falls, ID, Dennison, TX and Lake County, FL.
On June 1, 2019 the Plain View Project study was published online as a database. This resulted in immediate internal affairs investigations, officers placed on desk duty and mandatory sensitivity training. The media enthusiastically reported that thousands of officers endorsed violence against Muslims, women, and criminal defendants. The ACLU is outraged, CAIR is making demands and an assortment of social justice protesters started marching. Everyone is calling for police to be fired. That is how a successful information operation works.
At first glance the results of the so-called systemic look at officers on social media seems indefensible. However, a closer look reveals an extreme left wing biased, major flaws in the research and a calculated manipulation of data to skew the results. Comments were cherry picked, taken out of context and the data is presented in a way to make it look like all the comments in the posts were written by officers when most were posted by civilians on long comment threads. It is obvious that the project was designed to make officers look bad. It is a classic cop watch hit job dressed up as a legitimate research study.
Some posts had no obvious racist, sexist or religious bias of any kind and were inexplicably included because they supported conservative issues, politicians and commentators. For example, many officers were included in the database for sharing links to news articles and videos of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Pamela Geller, Brigitte Gabriel, Allen West and others or for linking to articles in conservative publications such as Breitbart, Fox News, Frontpage Mag, MEMRI, Townhall and others.