Bearded Hipster Cop

Submission 17,090

Part of a series on Hipster. [View Related Entries]

About

Bearded Hipster Cop, not to be confused with the nearly identical moniker given to the New York Police Department Detective Rick Lee, is the nickname given to Peter Swinger, a Metropolitan Police Service officer and former militaryman who was photographed while on crowd control duty during a rally held by Britain's far-right, anti-Muslim group English Defense League (EDL) in east London on May 9th, 2015. In the following days, Swinger quickly became internet famous for his well groomed facial hair that is stereotypically associated with hipster aesthetics.

Origin

On May 9th, 2015, British photojournalist Guy Smallman attended a highly controversial parade led by the country's far-right, Islamophobic political group English Defense League (EDL) to cover the event, during which he took a photograph of a Metropolitan Police Service officer with strikingly well-groomed facial hair. Smallman subsequently uploaded the photograph online via his Twitter account^[1] using the hashtag #HipsterCop. Within the first 48 hours, Smallman's photograph garnered more than 160 retweets and over 100 favorites.

Spread

That same day, a slew of other hipster and lumbersexual-related jokes surfaced on Twitter under the hashtag #hipstercop.^[8] According to Topsy Analytics^[11], the hashtag was mentioned more than 16,480 times over the course of the next 48 hours. By May 10th, London's bearded "Hipster Cop" had been picked up by several major news outlets in the U.K. and overseas, from The Independent^[2], Daily Mail^[3], London Evening Standard^[4] and The Scotsman^[5] to Mashable^[6], BuzzFeed^[7], Huffington Post^[8] and MTV^[10], among others.