Courtesy Social 2B

I am not a fan at all of people, organizations or companies that think they should use Social Media as their communications strategy.  Social Media is a communications tool, plain and simple.  I’m sure that you don’t have a policy or procedure on the use of a fax machine as your communications strategy.

Every business or organization that uses Social Media as a form of communication needs to understand and recognize that it should be part of your greater communications strategy and a tool to advance your overall strategy to engage your community, customers, clients, etc.  This includes Law Enforcement.

Having said all that, you do need to determine what platforms you are going to use in Social Media and what your intent is for using them.  Since one of the major resources you will commit to Social Media use is time, you have to have clear direction and intent so that you maximize the benefit.

You need to decide if you are going to be fully engaged with any feedback that comes in or if you will pick and chose to respond, or if you will have two way communication at all. (If that is your choice, you are missing the point of Social Media).

Will you allow uncensored open dialogue, or will you put in place a mechanism for vetting comments that are defamatory or hateful in nature?

Beyond conversation, you need to define what your purpose is.  Are you going to concentrate on community safety, crime prevention, traffic awareness, education?  Or are you going to promote your service as a great employer, pillar of your community and trusted source for information?

Without some defined direction you could end up spinning your wheels throwing tons of information at a well-intentioned Facebook page but having very little traction because it is so scattered.  You could be so busy monitoring conversations that you miss content.

The easiest way to define your strategy is to look no further than your agencies mission statement, values and vision. Design your strategy around those.  Make sure that Social Media and how you intend to use it fits into your agencies overall communication strategy.

When I went down the road of Social Media, I looked at the platforms, the tools and took the plunge, but it was always with a clear strategy in mind.  The Missions Statement of the Toronto Police Service ends with the line, “…partnership with our communities to keep Toronto the best and safest place to be.”  Traffic Services Mandate is to make traffic in Toronto safer and better (paraphrased).

Every tweet, status update, video favorite, blog post, etc is always geared to the strategy of finding ways to meet that goal, which is governed by the mandate and mission.

The Social Media strategy is to compliment the overall communications strategy.

So tell us what your strategy is. Do you have one? Do you shoot it all against the wall and hope some will stick? We would love to hear your feedback.

However, the essential part missing from Jim Gambles positioning is the Facebook data. The cases that end in a homicide while very disturbing are relatively rare occurrences but some bigger questions remain about Facebook’s policies and lack of information sharing. Facebook data is available for usage statistics but i have yet to locate anything released from the company itself related to safety and complaints on their platform. Let’s ask ourselves this; Where is the open data from Facebook that allows child protection advocates, police IT experts and caring citizens to view exactly just how many reports of inappropriate contact made their way to the through the Facebook abuse reporting system? Also, where is the transparency in data availability so that professionals can gage the true scope of the ongoing problem in order to assist with intelligent solutions?

As an example of moving in the right direction with regards to the release of platform data to their users, I noticed that Google released in April of this year six months worth of data that illustrated the amount of “requests from authorities” that had been made to remove content from its servers or provide information about users of their services or products. Challenging Mark Zuckerberg and his company Facebook to do the same Is worth a mention. After all brand management and PR is secondary to responsible internet citizenship, right?  I would request Mr Zuckerberg to take it one step further and categorize the data requests by law enforcement and also, and importantly so release data about user complaints based on the nature of the complaints.

Sarah Perez wrote in a recent write up at Read Write Web that “Facebook will also promote the button to it’s youngest users by way of prominent advertisements” That’s fine for Facebook and kudos to them for advertising on their own networks something that is not their own internal solution to the issue. Think of this; what if that button becomes the beacon and predators will only look for those without the button? You see we know that certain types of sexual deviants have high recidivism rates, that is to say that once they perpetrate a sexual crime that it is likely to be followed by same according to reams of well conduced research in this area. Sexual offenders have been shown to be highly skilled in their adaptations in order to continue offending, are we thus helping them avoid detection by the highly visible button as well? Could the discussion have been had about “hiding the button” on profiles but have them available to the users?

Here are some questions or thoughts I considered and jotted down when I first heard about the Facebook panic button and thought it would be a part of their system, lets see if with this new CEOP application if any of these points still apply:

1) Targeting profile behavior rather then by name and photo will assist in getting around the problem of Fake accounts created by serial predators.

2) Facebook may not wish to install alert system for younger people directly on their system due to legal concerns with the potential for insufficient backend policing of the reports.  Would this flow be properly and maintained in a timely fashion?  Predator->User->button->FB system/comms->Police? Here is a Scenario, child presses Facebook button but the Facebook system is slow, not responsive, not well designed, staff lose track and are not trained to recognize imminent threats and teen is contacted and murdered by another user, who is liable?

3) Alert tools are only as good as the Facebook communications with police are. I would like to hear back from law enforcement officials on their comparative experiences when asking certain social media platforms for information or if they do receive and how many unsolicited reports from Facebook or other platforms regarding potential threats?

4) Remembering the cautionary tale about putting the safety of kids in a large corporations hands.  Facebook is only as effective as their ability to ascertain risk and for their system to respond to such threats. There is no doubt that parents will always be the first line of defense.

Has Facebook considered working with the experts and or donating funds to groups like Kinsa to help law enforcement worldwide to assist in locating the children found in the disturbing images of child sexual abuse found online? Or maybe work with groups like cybertip or advertise on their networks in a geo-targetted campaign for groups like this worldwide? Lots more can be done…and we would like as parents and as users of their platform to hear about the projects, plans and ideas from Facebook.

I do also wonder if having the external button application will mean Facebook will still continue to monitor serious concerns by teens in the UK or if it will all go to CEOP by way of manual reports? Do they have an agreement here or is it only via the new application tab? I am waiting to hear back from CEOP on this question and will post what i find out for our readers.

With all of this said not knowing the scope of the problem on Facebook related to grooming and predator behavior due to lack of data releases by Facebook keeps me asking the harder questions. I do of course hope the CEOP button will be a successful mechanism to assist in protecting children and teens in the UK but do ask that people continue teaching their children about the online risks and to not allow technology to “babysit” your  precious children.

I still believe they should be. But I’m also coming to embrace temperance. The cultural shifts required for police to “socialize” online are as huge as they were 20 years ago, when community policing concepts first demanded them.

And just as it took time, baby steps really, for many agencies to embrace community policing… the same will be true for online community policing. How so? I could not have answered that until I found this the other day:

Here, the Community Roundtable explains how social presence isn’t created overnight. It takes time to plan, build, and establish. Its blog post explains the concept of “community maturity” in greater detail, along with some ways the organization uses the model.

You’ll notice that the model was drawn with a focus on internal community. The police department moving towards acceptance of social strategy will start, as most organizations, at the familiarity of “Hierarchy” – then as it grows more comfortable with its own agency’s community, will move along the continuum to “Network.”

This is true externally as well, however. Because police naturally relate to their publics as a hierarchy, the online application of community policing – requiring more trust, communication and interaction – will take time to grow.

The agency may move along the continuum at about the same time externally as internally, or they may be slightly ahead internally – this will make sense if commanders use the agency as a “proving ground” before bringing strategies and tactics to bear in the public.

And while a true “Network” may never form between police and civilians because of the necessary boundaries between police and public, it can and should form among police and other emergency response agencies.

But at no point should commanders ever feel that their efforts are not enough, or that they should do something they aren’t yet ready for – whether it’s following people back on Twitter, or re-branding their entire community policing strategy.

Community must be worked and built toward, so that incidents on a small or large scale can be dealt with without the added burden of interactive communications that don’t work.

How mature is your community? How might this model help you focus and refine your efforts?

First, Laura’s article “The Dark Figure of Social Media: What Can Twitter Teach Criminologists?” posted yesterday at Read Write Web talks about the necessity of research to help drive social strategy:

For me as a social scientist on Twitter, there’s an exciting potential for everyone from governments to nonprofits to utilize the power of real-time to hypothesize, design, conduct and finally utilize analytics.

What does this mean for law enforcement agencies? For starters, it will help drive forward how to use all these social tools we’ve been hearing about. I blogged several weeks ago about being bored with stories on how police departments all seem to be using social tools the same way. Laura’s research will give them the framework they need to start making decisions on how to use it not as others do, but in the ways that are best for them and their communities… even if (especially if) the idea breaks new ground.

Tied into this idea, Laura posted a tweet last night about Layar, the world’s first augmented reality web browser. Here’s the video:

watch?v=b64_16K2e08

The first thing that came to mind viewing this was: Holy crap, this would be an amazing tactical tool! For SWAT… for incident commanders… for drills… for traffic… for narcotics… the list goes on. What kinds of applications can you think of?

We’re hoping that once the G20 is over with, we’ll start to hear more from Tim, and Hervey too, and even a couple of our friends and colleagues from across the pond (whose social innovations we don’t hear enough about here in the US). But meanwhile, we hope you have a better idea now of what to expect: the kind of forward thinking Cops 2.0 was founded to bring to light.

First, a number of law enforcement professionals have begun to enter the space,  sworn cops with both policing and social experience, which is wonderful to see. Cops 2.0 readers deserve to have bloggers who know what they are talking about, because they live these issues. It’s one thing for a reporter to interview people; quite another for them to bring their own stories to bear. Isn’t that what social is all about?

Second, my public relations business, while doing pretty okay, has led me somewhat far afield from law enforcement per se. As a public relations consultant and (in some cases) representative, I’ve found myself using social media not as an end unto itself, but as part of the larger messaging toolbox.

Which brings me to the beginning…

Most police departments are finding, likewise, that social media doesn’t exist apart from other forms of community relations — and they need support in figuring out how social fits their overall mission. I’ve wanted to provide this support since I started, but business-building has left me with not much time to delve very deeply.

That’s why Cops 2.0 is changing hands. It will now be the official blog of the Canadian Association of Police on Social Media (CAPSM), maintained by longtime supporters Sgt. Tim Burrows, PIO of the Toronto Police Services Traffic Unit, and Laura Madison, criminologist and proprietor of Org9 Consulting. Hervey Simard of the Victoria (British Columbia) Police Department will join in (yes, bios are all coming), and of course, as newly minted U.S. chair to CAPSM, I’ll pop in every now and again to blog!

Laura, Tim and Hervey all have some truly space-altering ideas for CAPSM and this blog, things which I wanted to accomplish but never had time for. So, even though Canadian law enforcement differs somewhat from American, we all work toward a common goal using many of the same strategies and tactics — including social media. I think CAPSM’s asking me to stay on as chair reflects that, and I hope you’ll stick around to continue to learn from us.

Questions or comments? Leave them below!

How are budget cuts affecting your social strategy?

In April, the Wall Street Journal highlighted law enforcement budget cuts and what they meant for public safety:

Since January, Tulsa has laid off 89 police officers, 11% of its force. That has pushed the city to the forefront of a national movement, spurred by hard times, to revamp long-held policing strategies.

In the crosshairs: community-policing initiatives created over the past two decades, such as having officers work in troubled schools, attend neighborhood-watch meetings and help small-business owners address nuisance crimes like graffiti.

Other cuts listed include investigation, the traffic unit, undercover work, and surveillance.

In the past, I’ve thought social media could be the kind of force-multiplying technology that could help with community outreach where officers on a beat could not. Except now, I’m not so sure. You see, Tulsa has a good social media presence – or did. Now, its efforts are catch as catch can.

Struggling to reach the online community

I talked to Tulsa PIO Jason Willingham about all these issues: why some of his agency’s social media efforts are thriving, and others not; how he and his partner, down from a 3-person staff to 2, are managing their time; and what their tradeoffs are.

“We used to blog a lot, but now it’s fallen by the wayside,” says Willingham. Likewise the podcast, which was once maintained by a civilian volunteer together with an officer. The officer was laid off, and the civilian moved away. “We didn’t have the expertise to podcast well, and the community that’s into podcasting is small,” Willingham explains.

Thus the agency has “evolved” to microblogging: primarily, via Nixle, which is fed to Twitter. (Willingham says the agency’s Facebook page was originally intended for recruiting, so while it is maintained, it’s not a focus.) In Nixle, he and his partner have found “one of the easiest and most effective tools” for community outreach.

That’s because of the diversity of media to which Nixle publishes, including email and SMS. Email especially makes for popular forwards, says Willingham.

That’s far less work for Willingham, who divides his time among his duties as PIO, Crime Stoppers coordinator, and bomb squad member; and his partner, who is a training sergeant. Even so, Willingham says, he can do 3-5 interviews with media per day, and often finds himself coming to work on furlough days and days off.

“It’s hard to manage,” he says. “I feel a lot of guilt over all the things I could be doing, that I’m not.” For instance, every other week he makes rounds at the TV stations in order to talk about the department’s most wanted. Couldn’t social media make this easier?

No. First, any self-produced videos would be lower resolution, not professional quality enough for news stations to use, or the department to feel comfortable with. Second, it’s not the video clips that take the time – it’s finding the right suspects to broadcast during those 45 seconds. However, says Willingham, “We get a lot of tips, and we do find people, so we think the time spent is worth it.”

Civilians, mentioned in the Wall Street Journal, might help, but Willingham thinks these hires are another few years off. As for more widespread officer use, he agrees that this might help – TPD’s open media relations policy allows any officer to talk to media at any time – but again, two issues are in play:

First, the officers are simply too busy. Although the chief wants to return from a “sector” patrol system to a more community-friendly “beat” system, officers may get to know residents and business owners better, but that doesn’t mean they’d have the time to talk with them online.

Social strategy begins on the street

Willingham admits officer morale is low, which affects their ability to be more proactive and not simply call-hop. The reinstitution of the beat system may help, but coming to know the same “problem” residents may not.

Even so, TPD has a chance to lay the groundwork for a future, stronger social presence. Over time, they won’t just come to know people; they’ll come to know problems, resources, geography; of the people, they’ll learn who the community influencers are, both vocal and not.

Of such knowledge are problem-solving relationships built. This will not be easy – call-hopping does not lend itself to relationship-building, and some community members already don’t believe their officers are doing their best. But it’s not impossible, especially given the agency’s openness to social tools.

Social media does require a time commitment, and police do need to be online, at least in some capacity. Tulsa police have the benefit of having already tested many of the tools. They have what is working for their needs and current resources, so that when they are ready to pick it back up, they should be able to do so easily enough.

Meanwhile, they might introduce official social communication slowly, perhaps with an internal social program; or in the community, start with one small problem (say, the drag racing mentioned in the article), and build out from there.

Until then, though, Willingham says he continues to monitor local blogs and other mentions of Tulsa PD, as well as website statistics. “While its hard to put a percentage on time spent, I can say we use the numbers to determine where and what people want to know,” he says.

This has already had one result: a website redesign planned to launch in mid-summer. “We hope that this will simplify the content that we put out and make things a little more user friendly,” he adds. Will that include a blog? Possibly – but:

“Again [we] are concerned with not being able to provide a quality product 100% of the time. We have gone down the road of half hearted projects and that sends the wrong message before the reader or viewer even looks at the content. Hopefully, we can zero in on what works for our staff as well as what our consumers want so we can provide a quality product that is feasible for our department.”

Is your agency hurting for personnel? How is this affecting your social efforts or interest?

Image: SqueakyMarmot via Flickr

How will you respond to criticism of the way you handle a high-profile case?

An iPhone prototype lost, found, and then sold. A police raid on the home of the blogger who broke the story. In a public relations crisis that is largely eclipsed by the much bigger issues of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and Wall Street fraud, the Silicon Valley-based Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team (REACT) Task Force is facing criticism for two issues:

First, fears that it violated California’s journalist shield law. And second, that iPhone’s developer Apple, which sits on REACT’s steering committee, influenced the task force’s actions to too great an extent.

Compounding this, REACT seems as ill-prepared to respond as any law enforcement agency that is unused to widespread public criticism. That, I’m afraid, is a much bigger problem than most police might envision. But I’ll get to that in a second.

Messaging vs. communication during crisis

REACT doesn’t have a social media presence, other than an intermittently updated blog. The guestbook on their website has been taken over by criticism, however, in much the same way as Nestle’s Facebook page was by Greenpeace activists.

To REACT’s credit, they aren’t taking the criticism down (assuming they even know about it), but beyond that, haven’t said much. They’ve left communication to the public information officer at the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office, their “home base”:

To the extent that high-tech companies or other entities would send representatives to the meetings, they are considered members of the committee. While our records have not shown its attendance as of late, Apple is similarly situated as other companies or entities, which have open invitations to attend committee meetings at any frequency.

Meanwhile, task force leader Michael Sterner was quoted as saying that it was “not uncommon for investigators to make use of intelligence from firms’ internal security teams or to consult with companies’ security personnel as cases move forward” but that the task force does not “take directions on our investigations.” San Mateo chief deputy DA Steve Wagstaffe reminded reporters that Apple was the victim of a crime — a week after the controversy started.

In my opinion, these statements don’t go far enough. They don’t take into account the task force’s actual day-to-day work, its role in combating high-tech crime, the other cases they have worked since their inception — part of whose conditions was a private-sector steering committee. (One wonders if this in itself is the underlying basis for the criticism.) A lot more is in play here.

Crisisblogger Gerald Baron writes about the role of politics in a crisis:

“…the crisis managers [at BP and Goldman Sachs] involved in working these two humongous issues right now, will have a very significant impact on the long term decisions that elected officials will make in these two arenas.”

So, too, decisions affecting REACT and task forces like it. Recall the Heartland data breach, the Google data breach, and others. Breaches like these can lead to intellectual property theft as serious as laying hands on an iPhone prototype. They can also lead to identity theft, as when private personal and bank information in a company’s servers is sold. These affect everyone – not just the companies themselves.

Thus the need for police-private partnerships. In fact, many companies don’t involve police; they’re afraid of bad PR, and they risk that a breach dealt with quietly behind the scenes won’t evolve and go public. Police are working to change these attitudes, but they can’t do it without developing relationships with those companies.

And implications that police-private partnerships are inappropriate won’t help.

A social alternative to traditional crisis communication

Fast, clear, accurate communication is necessary during crisis

An ongoing high-profile investigation is the last thing most law enforcement administrators want to comment on, especially in the real-time social web. However, consider that numerous outlets already are doing so. Thus even if a response cannot talk about the case itself, it can work to mitigate the less wholesome coverage. Hint: that wouldn’t involve getting a subpoena to take down a news article.

So what if REACT had a social presence? It might take some lessons from a counterpart further to the northeast.

The Sacramento Valley High Tech Crimes Task Force has been, at least since 2003 when I first started working with one of its detectives, very media-friendly. This culture is driven by a desire to inform and educate the public; this desire in turn led to the task force’s social presence. Detective Dan Brown daily posts information about cyber crimes like identity theft, trying to educate his publics about threats and how to protect themselves.

In short, he talks about the same hard-to-understand issues that led to the task forces’ creation. So I asked him to speculate on how he would handle it if it was Sac Valley, not REACT, that was involved in the search. Here’s what he had to say:

I would address the question and in this way: The steering committee is made up of 52 law enforcement agencies and approximately 42 private businesses of the “high technology” industry and various financial entities.  The purpose of the steering committee (in summary) is to review task force activity and provide advice, recommendations, strategic input and direction for “task force consideration.”

With about 42 private entities involved, no one entity has more influence over the other and we have not experienced an extreme amount of pressure from any one entity.  The task force operates solely on state grant funding and requires no monetary contributions from any of the private entities.  The task force respects the advice and recommendations of the private industry committee members but we are not beholden to any private corporation.  In the end we make the decisions.

Fortunately, we have a great relationship with the private industry side and are of the same mind on most issues.  So our committee is made up of members who simply want to combat hi-tech crimes.  Political influencing and the pushing of individual agendas has never been an issue; furthermore, it would never be tolerated.

Note that Det. Brown is an investigator, not a PIO. That’s why it can be a mistake to defer to the “home” agency’s PIO, whose responsibilities are much broader than what one task force is doing. That person may have only the barest-bones idea of what a task force does and what it means to the community.

Ideally, then, it will be a task force representative managing task force social sites, and working hand-in-hand with the PIO – and, if necessary, legal teams – to communicate rather than message.

Social strategy and crisis communication

A good communication strategy can keep you from being sunk

When I first started writing this post, I thought it would boil down to strategy. A social presence set up solely to educate, I imagined, would be within its rights not to address bad PR. It would not want negative comments to dilute its educational content stream, or to drown out its longer-term message – especially if its resources were as limited as many agencies’ are.

But social culture is rooted in two-way communication. As many companies and law enforcement agencies broadcast, feedback continues to be important to their publics. Indeed, President Obama’s administration has been criticized for “[seeming] to imagine that releasing information is like a tap that can be turned on and off at their whim.”

This in contrast to his campaign, in which he and his staff tapped into social networking culture to drive a grassroots support for a variety of changes—among them, better government transparency. Thus inconsistent communication fails to generate or maintain trust just as much as no communication.

Which was behind Det. Brown’s response to my question about how he would handle social criticism:

As far as Facebook goes I think I would entertain critical comments as long as the language was appropriate for our younger fans.  I would address each comment as quickly as possible and with the utmost professional tone.  In the case where someone just can’t be satisfied or reasoned with, I would not continue in a back and forth debate, which almost always ends in a negative and unprofessional way, and consider removing the comments.

While our main purpose is to inform and educate, it would be a mistake to operate in such a manner which the public would keep us under the same ole law enforcement stereo type “not approachable, silent because we are hiding something, not truthful in our endeavors, etc.”

I want to improve communication between our task force and the community we serve.  There is no better way for a hi-tech crimes unit to communicate with the members of their community than on the computer.  I believe if you are going to reach out using social network mediums, you should be ready to converse with anyone who contacts you.  Be accessible, appear approachable and be willing to engage.

This means that above all, don’t just be on Facebook and Twitter because everyone else is on Facebook and Twitter. Know what you’re doing there, have a plan for crisis communication, and be the calm in the storm. That’s what builds trust that when you act in the interests of one segment of your community, you’re acting in everyone’s best interest.

Do you have a social crisis communication plan? Tell us about it in the comments!

Images: Ernst_Moeksis, alex-s, & Amanda_M_Hatfield via Flickr

Gov2Social has a clean directory interface

Researching social media use by other police departments – but don’t have the time to troll through the Twitter lists or Facebook pages? Check out Gov2Social, the new service from Microsoft’s Bright Side of Government. As Bright Side’s Kristin Bockius writes:

First, Gov2Social is a social media directory for state and local governments. Why is this important? I’ve mentioned a couple of scenarios above but more importantly we’re seeing a growing level of interest and adoption among state and local governments of Web 2.0 tools that support open and transparent government initiatives. However, we found a significant gap in how state and local governments and their citizens could connect online in a one-stop shop manner. With Gov2Social, state and local governments can share best practices, connect with peers, and learn how to implement social networking services – all of which help advance the usage of Gov 2.0 tools.

Gov2Social is not a complicated site, not by any stretch. The interface is clean and simple and uncluttered, as any directory should be; you can run a keyword search like “police,” or a name search like “California.” So how would a law enforcement user put it to work?

First, become a part of it. Several law enforcement agencies have already inputted their information. The more agencies are listed here, the more valuable the site will be to others researching law enforcement social media implementation – especially the more tools are listed.

Second, however, use it to connect with local and state politicians. Generally, I’m not a great fan of how politicians use social media; they tend to broadcast, and the information they put out is dry. (You’re at another fundraising event? Glad to hear…) It doesn’t make one want to try to engage.

I see Gov2Social as the beginnings of a challenge to that. By making it easier to find elected officials – who wants to spend time guessing Twitter usernames? – the site will make it easier for us to talk to them. How does that affect law enforcement?

• It could connect directly with key politicians and other government agencies, such as emergency management. Even agencies that don’t want to follow individuals on Twitter can make use of a network of government accounts.
• It could encourage its publics to connect with local politicians regarding public safety issues. Use Gov2Social to find the appropriate channels, then write a blog post or reference @username in a tweet.
• Take the above idea to the next level and design an entire strategy to get a problem solved, especially if it’s something that requires more funding than is budgeted. Being a squeaky wheel, and getting your publics behind you in the social spaces (think YouTube videos, Flickr photos, blogs, and other forms of crowdsourcing), might just do the trick.

Gov2Social just launched, so you won’t find the numbers of government officials and agencies there – yet – to put the above ideas in motion. But do submit a listing, do bookmark it, and do talk about it so it has the chance to grow to its potential.

How information sharing can help solve problems

I thought it might be useful to provide an example of what I am talking about when I say that law enforcement agencies can do more – a lot more – with social media than they currently are.

First, Joe the Cop

Joe’s latest blog post concerns the beatdown of a compliant motorist by a police officer. A defensive tactics trainer, Joe provides an excellent perspective into why this might have happened:

Ofc. James Mandarino, “amped up from a vehicle pursuit and believing he was about to confront 2 possibly combative drunks, prepared for the worst as the car pulled over” and ultimately committed himself to use of force. The reason? Possibly, fear. More on that in a second.

Next, Crisisblogger

A not unrelated blog post by Gerald Baron:

If you or your senior execs think that you are at a neutral starting point in public perception when an ugly situation hits, and your goal is to keep at neutral or above, you deal with the crisis in one way. But, what if you are starting the crisis from the perspective of a deep hole–that you are not neutral but public perception is already very negative, how does that impact how you deal with the crisis?

Taking it a step further

What if Joe were the chief of Ofc. Mandarino’s department? He’d be in the position Baron wrote about. He’d be on the defensive. He certainly wouldn’t want to explain his officer’s actions as the product of fear. What member of the public wants to know its chief hires scaredycat cops?

Unless Joe was going to put together a comprehensive argument for why his agency needs a better training budget, and better training.

The Force Science Research Center has published information showing that a police officer’s fear response can actually be rewired with practice, overriding that instinct and replacing it with the instinct to act rather than react.

Joe the Chief, then, might use his blog to publish a graph showing how the recession has impacted his training budget. This might show one of several things:

• A decline in money allocated to training, and a corresponding drop in training.
• A decline in money, but an increase in certain types of training.
• An increase in training money, corresponding with increases in certain types of training (at the expense of others?)
• An increase in money, and an increase in training overall. This might indicate a problem with the officer.

This takes guts

Decreases in money are easy. Joe the Chief can use them to show how his agency needs more funding, which might inspire one or more local businesses to donate money, for instance. Even if the donation must go into the city’s general fund, the city is already under pressure to provide better training for the police department. (Joe the Chief might even work together with Bill the Fire Chief or others to ask for better overall public safety training and education.)

Increases in money are harder, because then it comes down to the chief’s own decision-making. The chief might have decided to allocate funds to training as a response to some other problem – digital evidence, for example, gangs, or narcotics.

This is what we mean by “transparency.” An agency that has communicated its problems all along will be more credible when an officer does something bad; the chief can say, “Clearly we need to devote more to defensive tactics training.”

Of course there are other issues in play. Training is sometimes a matter of officer motivation, as this PoliceOne.com article (more from the FSRC) points out. Officer motivation is a matter of hiring and retaining the right people. Personnel issues sometimes don’t come to light until after the officer has been at work for several years. And no chief wants to, or should, throw his or her personnel under the bus.

Transparency via social media demands a delicate balance between information sharing and leadership. The public and the officers need both. Ideally, the department’s leaders are communicating both internally and publicly.

Yeah, that’s a lot of work. A lot. As Baron wrote in a separate blog post:

We are still fighting today’s public information battles with old strategies and outdated technologies. Until communicators and their leaders understand how much the world has changed, the same mistakes will be repeated.

The job of the crisis communicator today isn’t so much put out a press release and then do some on camera interviews. It is much more about listening, evaluating, advising, and participating in the swirl of information and discussion about the event.

It’s scary. But it can be done… and needs to be done.

What assumptions are you prepared to change about public communications?

Image: Intersection Consulting via Flickr

When it comes to social media, are you waiting for something more?

I’ve had something on my mind for awhile: the shiny object has lost its luster, and I’m getting bored.

A year ago Amber Naslund was blogging about this: stop talking about how great it is, she wrote (I’m paraphrasing), and get to work figuring out how to use these tools. Lately I’ve read Tamar Weinberg and Sean Moffitt blog frustrations similar to mine, and so I need to speak up too.

I’ve been feeling stuck in a rut for some time, because there’s only so many times you can point to a police department or task force that is totally rocking social media and say, “They’re doing it right.” First of all, “right” is defined by so many different variables: resources, staffing levels, staff willingness to socialize, public willingness to socialize back.

Second, I’m finding that the police departments “doing it right” are generally the same ones who are doing policing right. They already know how to work with the press, interact with their publics. If they feel they need that little bit of extra online impact, they hire a PR agency… but it was because they had the underlying pieces in place, first.

As so many PR and marketing people have pointed out, social media/Web 2.0/the Internet is just the latest in a set of tools meant to help us all connect more easily with the people we serve. With regard to police departments, these tools facilitate information sharing. If an agency doesn’t want to share information, no blog or Twitter page in the world can help change that.

There are, to be sure, different rules. The Web is still relatively anonymous, or if it isn’t, people are used to thinking of it that way (and thus posting whatever is on their minds). Officers walking down the street off duty don’t identify themselves, so if they’re drunk and puke on the sidewalk, it’s not the same as drunk tweeting that you just puked… with your badge or blue twibbon or whatever identifying yourself as a cop.

Still, as I wrote a command officer on the LinkedIn group Law Enforcement 2.0, if you expect your officers to abide by professional conduct policy offline, if you trust and respect them to be responsible and they trust and respect you right back, you probably won’t have a problem online either – and if you do, it will be easier taken care of than rampant reputation-management problems.

A few months ago I interviewed a longtime source/collaborator about his “secret sauce” when it came to relationship-building. He’s the kind of guy who, when I tell other sources that Kipp said they should jump, they ask “How high?”

And yet he’s not using social media — other than his LE-only listserv, the only online tool he needs for what he IS doing: building relationships with other investigators, with the media, with pretty much anyone who might be able to help him down the road and vice versa.

Not to mention the public. He goes out and gives presentations to seniors and other high-risk victim groups. Just as with the investigators, when they need someone they can trust for advice, who are they going to call?

Folks, that should be your focus. Never mind about how often to tweet or how many people to follow or fans to attract or who should be doing the blogging. The questions are, how do you and your officers interact with people — each other and the public — offline, and how do you want to translate that online? What will make a Twitter or Facebook or blog presence able to continue your offline work?

Hint: it’s a force multiplier, but I don’t mean in terms of “spreading your message.” One cop in a coffee shop can reach maybe a dozen people, but put him on Twitter in the coffee shop, tweeting about who he just talked to and what public safety problem they want him to solve, and you’ve got a couple hundred or more followers who might just be able to offer their take on how you can best serve them.

Sure, it’s scary. It demands humility: what 30-year professional wants to be told by non-cops how to police them? But if relationships are all about compromise, then you’re not just there to deal with “the customer is always right”; you’re there to help them understand when they can and can’t have what they want, what you can and can’t do, and why.

Open communication leads to respect, and that’s been true of police departments since the beginning. In the recent past, chiefs who had good strong relationships with media could count on positive as well as more critical press, and as long as officers were on the streets interacting with everyday people, they could count on public trust as well.

Still, cops are fundamentally cynical about relationships and trust, and sometimes they’re right to be. Social media changes nothing about that. It takes as much hard work as any other form of communication, and it won’t solve problems overnight. And I guess that’s the biggest reason why in coming months, I’ll be focusing less on social media and more on what makes it tick:

I’m afraid that the way police understand and use it right now, it won’t make as much difference to law enforcement as so many of us believe it can.

Thoughts?

Image: Jayel Aheram via Flickr