Seeking LE organization willing to work virtually with supervised university students.

The goal is to give students more exposure to real officers and police administrators and fewer TV cops.

Are you willing to partner with a handful of students with retired-LE professor oversight on a small project tailored to your department/team needs? All project ideas considered, prefer those reated to mobile technology, with no anticipated cost to your organization.

I got excited about this even before Carter referred his readers to Cops 2.0, so please head on over, read the rest of his post and let us know if you’re interested. Thanks!

Policing for a future generation

I find Carter’s work — bringing younger citizens into active law enforcement research — especially important because, as 2012 begins, I think we need to take stock of where policing currently sits. In recent months I’ve seen a couple of opinions that indicate community policing, as we knew it in the 1990s, is dead; meanwhile, technology provides police with ever-increasing amounts of data about private citizens. Law enforcement, along with the societies it polices, is clearly in transition as technology and privacy collide at unprecedented rates.

This is not just true of the kinds and amount of data an investigator can glean from social media, surveillance video, license plate readers, and so on. It will also increase as law enforcement becomes comfortable with technology such as:

• Augmented reality
• The internet of things
• Radio frequency identification (RFID)
• Biometrics
• Artificial intelligence

How police use these technologies, the extent to which they use them, and what they do with the data will face intense public and legal scrutiny, as they should. Now’s the time to get comfortable with transparency; if you’re worried about the bad guys finding out how you use technology, then you need to get creative about understanding 1) what the public needs to know and 2) how to communicate it to reduce privacy fears without giving away too many details.

Transparency sits between accountability and exposure

This may be more important than you think. As Scott Dickson wrote the other day, some agencies remain steeped in politics, manipulating their crime statistics by asking officers not to take reports. This, as Scott writes, is a double public relations whammy: not only does it look bad to citizens, who are unlikely to support budget increases for such an unprofessional agency; it also hurts the agency’s ability to see (and thus respond to) emerging problem patterns.

That’s especially worrisome given the balancing act our culture finds itself in as we begin a new decade. This infographic from the Institute for the Future has an interesting item, a “critical balance” of exposure and accountability that notes:

In the face of growing demand for accountability, public exposure will emerge as as a multifaceted strategy for disrupting existing power structures, both hidden and obvious, both criminal and socially beneficial.

There is both danger and opportunity in that balance: danger to certain law enforcement power structures, like the kind that manipulate crime stats. But also opportunity, for innovative investigators to understand and exploit how criminal power structures are being disrupted.

Indeed, Tim Burrows made relevant predictions in his recent post for the IACP Social Media Beat:

• The ‘love-in’ experienced, “just because” the public’s local police are using social media is over and the public will demand (and deserve) greater accountability.
• There will be less tolerance for mistakes, faux pas, and ignorance.
• Working partnerships with individuals of influence, community groups, professional partnerships, and other police agencies will be standard.

As arms of the government, it’s incumbent on police to provide fair leadership to their communities. The law enforcement commander who doesn’t believe he has to justify his agency’s technology use — who believes crime-fighting is justification unto itself — necessarily invites public scrutiny. So does the commander who takes advantage of grant money without a long-term strategy to go with it; both COPS and homeland security programs have seen this happen.

True transparency shows strength, not weakness

This month’s Officer.com column describes using content to serve an agency’s goals, whether related specifically to social media, or more broadly to relationship-building. Besides that column, nearly two years ago (!) I wrote about one example of this kind of activity. There’s a lot of promise for communication. But also a lot of agencies that are so focused on the status quo that they can’t get out of their own way.

Digital content shared through social media can show how police are relevant and important to civil society, as well as weaknesses that need to be shored up. This is the exact opposite of stat manipulation because it’s not trying to cover over weakness; it’s leadership in asking for help to solve the problem.

Yes, the public needs to know a strong police force can competently and adequately enforce laws; but that’s during personal or community crisis. If an agency can’t provide services, in or out of crisis, because it lacks the funds to buy the technology that would enable that provision, then the public deserves to know up front, and deserves to become part of the solution. That was the promise of community policing.

What balances are you striking in your police work?

photo credit: Calm Vistas

Some highlights from this past month:

Newark police headquarters goes high tech

A “mission control” center for disaster response, a high-tech-investigations room that gives city detectives real-time access to federal crime databases — and a meeting room where community groups can meet with police leaders.

The way this story was packaged caught my eye because even with all the ostensibly “Big Brother” style high tech, some emphasis remained for low-tech face to face relationship-building. I’m pretty naive, but I’d like to think this means NPD will use that room to give adequate attention to those who are worried about the way they’re policing. It’s something for other departments to keep in mind as they move further into the realm of high tech.

Three stories on social network analytics

SAS turns social media analytics into intel weapon focuses on sentiment analysis in 28 languages, while Social network analytics saves lives in Iraq is about artificial intelligence. The SAS article is PR-heavy and the InfoWeek article is somewhat oblique (only so much can be discussed without compromising OPSEC), but both are interesting in that they look at technology police may be using in the not too distant future.

Along similar lines was an article about predictive analytics, which prompted me to post on Facebook: “Used the right way, this may be a hybrid between reactive and proactive/community policing. However, data can never replace human relationships, and police shouldn’t overrely on predictive policing.” It’s an argument I made earlier this year in writing about the value of HUMINT and community policing compared to high tech use.

A two-fer on the use of Predator drones

KXAN in Texas covered a convention of UAV enthusiasts, many of whom do help law enforcement on search and rescue missions. Just a day later, though, the LA Times featured law enforcement use of federal agencies’ drones, questioning whether the routine practice is wise. Although courts have ruled that warrantless aerial surveillance is legal — what’s done out in the open cannot be assumed to be legal — drones make surveillance more accessible to police. Once again, it’s officer safety vs. government transparency.

Predictions for law enforcement technology, community service

Finally, I didn’t bookmark this in Scoop.It but it caught my eye nonetheless, because of the predictions it made for the coming year. Most relevant:

• A store will be where the customer says it is.
• Augmented reality and plain old reality will merge.
• Social traction will correlate to brand affinity.

In a law enforcement context:

If stores are going mobile, be prepared for customers to want to interact with police departments this way, too. I’m not talking just getting your text-message Nixle alerts; I mean e-government services like mobile citation payments, real-time crime mapping, crime reporting, etc. Is your website mobile-friendly? Do you have apps for citizens to use?

AR could be huge for law enforcement. The ability to layer information over buildings and faces, for instance, has enormous tactical implications. The only problem is budgetary. But if you’re fortunate enough to live near a university doing research in this area, that can be one good way to jump on the leading edge.

Finally, “social traction and brand affinity” simply mean that more people will pay attention to you online if you’re giving them information they can trust. Not what you think they should trust — but what they can rely on because it educates and is relevant to them. What they need to know, not what you want them to know.

How are you communicating your agency’s use of high tech to the public?

photo credit: jumpinjimmyjava

Mere months after Cops 2.0 began, a promising new service opened for business. Nixle, a one-way messaging service, meant that police who were still social media-shy could use Twitter, text messaging and other tools to send many different kinds of messages to their citizens — all for free.

That’s changed. Last week, Nixle announced that it would start charging its member agencies for use. The decision caught many departments off guard. Some are canceling their service. Others are paying in the short term, but looking for options.

At least one has found a solution, and it, too, is free. That this agency was one of Nixle’s first users is no small thing. Long-time readers of this blog may remember Tyrone, GA Police Chief Brandon Perkins from his glowing Nixle review (which continues to be one of the highest-traffic posts on this site). Now, Chief Perkins is here to tell us how free software is helping him stay in touch with his citizens.

My agency, a 16 officer department just south of Atlanta, was the first in the State of Georgia and the 16th in the United States to join Nixle back in April 2009.

The move brought immediate positive press coverage to the agency and an influx of highly positive comments from our citizens. We wrote policy and trained our field supervisors in its use so that emergency messages could be sent 24/7 – a move that got us even more recognition. Agencies from across the country were calling me to find out how the service worked, how we were training our officers, and requesting copies of my policy.

It was an amazing concept and, as a budget conscious administrator, I was extremely thankful that it was offered at no cost to first responder agencies. I have to admit that I was skeptical because no self respecting business man would offer anything for free to the government, but we and thousands of other agencies were assured that we would not be charged for this service – Nixle was funded by a sister company that charged for their services in the private sector.

The honeymoon lasted just shy of two years.

From free to fee

All of Nixle’s member agencies received an email last week explaining that they would begin charging for most of their services effective April 29, 2011. The cost would be $1495 for the first year – a “loyalty discount” – and then a minimum fee of $3000 per year after that depending on population.

I was on the phone with their corporate offices within five minutes of reading the email and, apparently, I wasn’t alone. The representative that I talked to advised me that they had received calls from several unhappy agencies.

As a consolation, they were going to continue to provide all members with the ability to send emergency text alerts for free. Thanks, but no thanks. I can see the writing on the wall and I’m simply not going to wait for the other shoe to drop.

So what is an agency with a limited budget and a loyal following on a very stable and popular communication system to do when the provider they relied on and helped to build (yes, I went there) goes to a fee based business model? Three words: Open. Source. Software.

WordPress to the rescue

Simply put, my agency already had a website that was built on the free WordPress platform. All I had to do was install two new plugins (they were free, too) and we had our own nearly automatic mass communications system. The cost? About $10 a year for the domain name and about $90 per year for a hosting account (in our case, we share a hosting plan with the city).

I got the message from Nixle last Thursday, installed and tested the plugins on Friday, and communicated Nixle’s intention to begin charging us and our lack of funding or desire to pay for this service to my citizens (using Nixle’s system, of course) on Saturday.

The plugins that I used were SMS Text Message and Subscribe2. (You can also find these by doing a search in the ‘Install Plugin’ area in the Admin section of Word Press.)

How the plugins work for communication

As of Wednesday, we had over 200 members on our new system and growing. I’ve received several emails from my citizens thanking me for being fiscally responsible and for continuing in our commitment to providing them with real-time information via our new locally managed system – I’m a bigger winner than Charlie Sheen!

Unlike Nixle, my solution will not allow us to simultaneously send an email and text alert to a subscriber’s cell phone. Instead, an email is automatically sent to all subscribers when we post to our blog and we have to go to the SMS module within the Admin area of our site to send text messages.

Admittedly, this is not the “cleanest” process, but we will only be sending texts for major emergencies which are rare in my community and the text message interface is extremely user-friendly. All other messages – equivalent to Nixle’s “Community” level messages – will be submitted as a blog post and our citizens will get an email alert containing the text of the post and a link to it on our blog.

We have used Nixle to consistently send an average of 4 to 5 (mostly non-emergency related) messages per month to our subscriber base of nearly 700 members over the past two years and I am confident that our new system, although it hasn’t been around long enough to prove itself, will do a fine job for us and our loyal subscribers.

For those who may be interested in pursuing this route, Word Press is a very stable and user-friendly platform, so the learning curve for your staff should be minimal. I am currently the only member of my agency who has any responsibility with our website and I spend less than an hour per week maintaining it. A cron job performs an automatic backup of my database and sends it to my email each afternoon and adding a post or page to the site is as easy as sending an email. In fact, Word Press can be setup so that you can actually post via email!

The bottom line is this: Nixle provides an amazing set of services that any agency would be proud to offer its citizens, but there are other ways to get the job done without raising your millage rate. The internet is full of open source software and applications that can be combined to accomplish nearly any task you can think of. In some cases, it might even be financially feasible to pay a software developer to write a system to fit your needs – the upfront cost might be high, but once you own it it’s yours!

I am available to discuss our system and to provide guidance to any emergency response agency who may be interested. I can be reached at bperkins@tyrone.org or you can get all of my contact information and see our system in action at www.tyronepd.org.

photo credit: JMRosenfeld

Could high tech make police irrelevant?

The Memphis Daily News’ article about information and intelligence sharing among Tennessee law enforcement officers shows the ways in which high tech makes traditional policing more efficient — ultimately, needing fewer officers to do the same amount of work.

This can be especially profound in communities like Rialto (Calif.), where the police department has lost about 10 officers in one year. Web-based crime reporting and crime mapping, together with traditional community policing, has led to decreases in most crimes. Likewise as PoliceOne.com points out, cameras are cheaper than hiring police officers, especially in small towns.

The hidden costs of high tech policing

On the other hand, in Columbus (Ohio), these force multipliers carry hidden costs. Training, upgrades and support staff — the Columbus Police Department’s technical unit has grown from 1 to 20 people — can be pricey.

Last month, The Crime Report provided a good rundown of other high tech issues facing law enforcement. Covering topics as diverse as video evidence, biometrics, social media, predictive policing, and GPS, the article brought up three important points:

1. There are no substitutes for good traditional police work, which frequently figured into even the most high tech of investigations.
2. Law enforcement must address the potential for abuse of technology if they are to be effective.
3. Technology is often seen as a “panacea” rather than critically compared alongside more traditional approaches.

Bodies vs. tech

These issues appear to be coming to bear most strongly in Chicago, where a manpower shortage together with violent crime is colliding with a push toward more high tech use. On the tech side, now-resigned Police Superintendent Jody Weis argues that the technology itself, including consolidating intelligence services under his office,  social network analysis in combating gangs, and the use of high tech surveillance cameras, (along with training) is responsible for reductions in crime.

However, in an opinion about the surveillance cameras, blogger Second City Cop speaks for many officers when he argues, “You know what protects the senior citizen? Cops on the streets.” Chicago media have reported that the 200 expected new hires this year won’t make up for the estimated 300 officers leaving the force, and there are 950 total vacancies. Meanwhile, Mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel pledged during his campaign to put 1,000 more officers on the streets, not just through hiring but also through administrative changes.

Human vs. electronic intelligence

Former blogger Joe the Cop put this in perspective for me by recalling news articles about intelligence immediately following 9/11. “I remember reading more than a few articles that discussed the lack of HUMINT — human intelligence — as opposed to the availability of electronic data gathered through high-tech methods,” he told me.

“Just as a special ops soldier is needed to run counterinsurgency on the ground, and a rifleman is needed to occupy ground long enough for stability to return, a beat cop is needed to project safety on a given street corner.  Cameras and computer analysis don’t do that–they are largely reactive tools that allow for more effective investigation of crimes after they occur.  It’s a cop in uniform on the street who deters crimes.”

Technology cannot multiply a force, in other words, without the force deploying it. In Columbus, the tech unit’s commander was quoted as saying: “Our challenge… isn’t the technology or the funding; it’s having enough staff to manage all the different projects right now.”

Indeed, it is not about playing technology and staff off against each other, as the Defense Department implies. Instead, it’s about figuring out how the cops on the street work in conjunction with those in the predictive analysis unit.

Joe’s point about HUMINT plays this up. Cops on the street deter crimes, and while they are doing that, they are also noticing things. Fundamentally, this is community policing: knowing enough about the neighborhood and the people in it to know when something is amiss.

That’s why taking cops out of cruisers and putting them back on foot was so important: with driving occupying so much of their attention, they couldn’t see the same things they could while standing on the corner, couldn’t hear the same things they could while listening to passersby.

HUMINT provides context to the intel coming in to predictive analysis centers from technology. This is even more true when the officers can use technology — think images and video uploaded from the street to the center, or even augmented reality — to enhance their observations in real time, rather than at roll call or in meetings.

What kinds of technical skills will police need for these roles — and more importantly, how might we turn those assumptions on their head? That’ll be the topic in my next post.

Where do you see the balance between technology and personnel? Leave a comment!

photo credit: BinaryApe

But in January 2009, signs in Austin (Texas) were hacked. Displaying messages like “Caution! Zombies Ahead!!!”  they slowed traffic and made for some debate about “harmless fun” (reminiscent of the MIT hacks) vs. vandalism as a threat to public safety.

The signs were not connected to the internet, so hackers had to be there physically to break the locks and the passwords on the controller computers inside. Nevertheless, technology advancements mean that law enforcement administrators need to remember: information security isn’t just about sensitive employee and crime-related data.

• In late 2010, Iowa’s AMBER Alert system was hacked for the third time that year. The culprit: a vulnerability in the site, which also hosted the Iowa State Patrol’s crash report website.
• Between April and November the same year, confidential Mesa County (Colorado) Sheriff’s Department data were exposed due to a mistake by an employee. The 20-year-old database contained confidential informant records along with police intelligence.
• And in England, North Yorkshire police were found to have violated data protection laws more than three dozen times over three years.

Why are these stories important? They reflect that the more law enforcement agencies rely on information technology to make police work more efficient, the more threats they will face from both outside and inside. Whether student pranksters (as was speculated in Austin), foreign operatives (as was speculated in Iowa), or ill informed employees, these threats can take many different forms.

For example, remote-controlled robots are increasingly being deployed in bomb and hostage situations, as in Milwaukee in December. However, as early as last year, cybercrime and security expert Marc Goodman warned of vulnerabilities in battlefield robots, which could easily translate into vulnerabilities for police robotics as well.

The point is not to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) about deploying new technologies. Rather, as Goodman puts it: “While electronic warfare is a relatively old domain, the presence of battlefield (and perhaps police robots) means there is a whole additional set of technologies which need to be fully understood and protected prior to deployment in real world scenarios.”

The same can be said of social media, “the cloud,” or even computer-controlled traffic signs. Nothing is completely secure; the human factor trumps all. However, the public- and officer-safety, force-multiplying, and investigative benefits of each kind of technology are too great to avoid them entirely.

What kind of security research have you done on technology you considered or deployed? How have you prepared your employees for best security practices?

photo credit: Idaho National Laboratory

TLO

Designed for agencies that can’t afford a subscription to Lexis-Nexis’ Accurint or ChoicePoint, TLO is rapidly becoming a strong competitor for both services, and is a viable alternative for small or medium-sized agencies with no budget. That’s because Accurint’s designer is behind it, and boasts a team of law enforcement, prosecutors, programmers, scientists, and executives — many of whom have worked together for decades.

Take time to poke around the site and register for the service — you won’t be disappointed.

National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C)

The NW3C provides quite a few resources, including free training, free investigative assistance, and even financial support for some cases. The catches: first, a case must have a tie to financial crime (though nearly all high tech crime cases do). And second, the agency must be a member.

However, once the agency is signed up — again for free — the NW3C provides a wealth of assistance. It runs information through all major databases and provides free software — along with the training to use it — such as TUX4N6 for on-site previews, PerpHound for mapping GPS or cell tower coordinates, and others.

In addition, the NW3C has a partnership with the FBI and the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) to sponsor the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), a good resource to which to direct citizens when you can’t take the report or don’t have the resources to investigate yourself.

NCIC Off-Line Search

The National Crime Information Center (NCIC) Off-Line Search is, because of the power of NCIC’s online searches, vastly underutilized. However, it could “could assist an investigator in locating an item of property, determine the proximity of an individual to a crime scene, substantiate or discredit an alibi, or trace the route of a person of interest.” It exists, in other words, to provide leads and obtain information not generally available through an online query.

The Off-Line Search has been used to help identify and capture Timothy McVeigh, recover stolen vehicles and kidnapping victims, and solve murders. It is accessible via email, phone or NLETS.

LocalCrimeNews.com

Though not originally designed for law enforcement, LocalCrimeNews.com provides instant updates anytime a suspect or convict is arrested anywhere else in the nation. This is a tool that’s valuable for information sharing — if the name you’re tracking shows up in your email, you have only to contact the arresting agency to take your investigation one step further.

The Hi-Tech Resources Listserv

Lots of listservs, forums and other resources exist for high tech crimes investigators. Some are available after you become a member of the sponsoring organization. Others are free, but are focused on areas like digital forensics.

The Hi-Tech Resources Listserv, however, was founded as a way to share search warrant, corporate liaison contact, and investigative information. Originally a resource for investigators in northern and central California, the Yahoo! list has rapidly expanded to include more than 1,000 members in states as far east as New Jersey.

Resources include regularly updated law enforcement liaison information for internet and cell service providers, cell service provider data retention records, sample search warrants and subpoenas, and information related to specific crimes including high-tech stalking, child exploitation and identity theft.

Listowner Kipp Loving, a detective in central California, tells me that instructors from SEARCH and the NW3C encourage their trainees nationwide to join the list. To join, you need to be prepared to provide the following information:

• Full name with agency name
• Contact information (phone or e-mail, preferably work address and not a Yahoo email)

This information is kept confidential and the list is limited to law enforcement. Be prepared to have your affiliation verified before you join!

What free tools are your favorites, and why?

Image: KOMUnews via Flickr

Today’s guest post comes courtesy of Ari Herzog, a social media marketer who serves on the Newburyport (Mass.) city council. A longtime Cops 2.0 reader, Ari is a proponent of open government — government agencies using technology to make the public part of what they do. Today’s post is about how one of them is doing just that.

You must credit the Illinois Emergency Management Agency for thinking out of the box and continually striving to educate students about disaster preparedness.

From activity books to PSA writing challenges, IEMA wants every youth in the state from pre-schoolers to college students to know what to do when disaster strikes. Seeking a gap in their educational approaches with middle school students, the Illinois Terrorism Task Force commissioned the creation of a video game to help kids learn about effective response strategies. The first simulation, “The Day the Earth Shook,” was released November 15 and focuses on earthquake zones in the southern part of the state.

The game was developed by the Electronic Visualization Lab at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and the Center for Public Safety and Justice of the Institute of Government and Public Affairs at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

“We knew that we needed to do something that we would be fun, but they’re too old for coloring books and activity books at that age,” said Patti Thompson, communications manager for IEMA in an article published by Government Technology. “So it just seemed like the video game route was something new to do, a new direction to go.”

I think it’s an awesome idea. The world may be watching Facebook applications and Twitter innovations, but video games are just as popular.

What caught my eye was his mention of how high tech can be used to improve officer safety and community relations… or to damage officers’ relationships with their administrators:

Several years ago, I was approached by some of the administration in my police department about putting GPS locators in the police cars.  The idea had several layers to it.

1. They see where a car was and dispatch the closest unit to an incident
2. If an officer was in trouble they could find the car and send help to the officer.
3. If an officer was “out of zone” they could use it as a tool to make sure officers were staying where they are supposed to.

While the first two reasons were valid.  Any “big brother” style monitoring of police officers is going to be met with resistance.  And this was.  At the time, the usability of GPS tied to the computers in the cars was ridiculous at best.  Simply because of the nature of the communications protocols.  But the administration pushed for it and USB antenna’s were purchased.  Officer’s were told they “must plug them in” when in the car and on duty.

Officers who did so were met with calls from their supervisors when they left their assigned areas to go eat, or use the restroom or whatever.  So they started not plugging them in.

I recently heard that some steps had been taken to ensure they were being utilized.  There is no doubt in my mind the steps taken hinged on threats from the administration of disciplinary action if they weren’t utilized.

So the little pieces of equipment were getting “damaged” by other equipment in the car.  They plug into the USB ports on the computers in the cars and USB ports wear out.  They are held in place by FRICTION.  The flimsy little wires going to the antennas were being pinched by other pieces of equipment, severing them.

What is my point?  First, if you as a police officer are doing your job the right way, why do you care that a supervisor is watching?  Second.  If your police officers are doing their job the right way, what do you as a supervisor care if they go to a “cop friendly” restaurant or a clean facility to use the restroom?  I don’t want spit in my food anymore than the next guy.

If the officers are spending that much time and energy to render the equipment inoperable…  how much time is spent actually crime fighting?

When administrators have nothing better to do that sit around and watch police car videos, looking for something the officer is doing wrong, what job is being overlooked?  Which one of your administrative tasks is being neglected while you try to relive your glory days watching cops do their thing and to what end?

It’s hard to reconcile these words with the articles at sites like PoliceOne.com and Officer.com, which are about how police administrators can improve their relationships with officers as well as the public. But this isn’t the first time I’ve read something like this, either. In fact, this PoliceOne article backs up Scott’s observations.

How prevalent is this problem? Hard to know. I’d like to think that in an era of such severe budget cuts, admins are focusing on better things, like helping their officers to stay alive.

Then again, at least one friend in a hard-hit agency talks about what a war zone his city has become — and how political his agency. It’s as if the cops, stuck in survival mode, have adopted an “every man for himself” ethic rather than banding together. In that kind of environment, it would be easy for a budget-conscious chief to micromanage, especially if it led to being able to lay off “underperforming” officers.

There is a lot of talk in police executive circles about numbers: Compstat, problem-oriented policing, and so on. But these will only work if the administration is willing to go all the way — to refuse to allow criminals and their supporters to game the system. To use the tools the way they were intended: as a supplement to crime data; for instance, how do officer locations (based on GPS) square with the hotspots?

Policing appears to have reached something of a crossroads. On one road are the numerous tools that could stand to make the job more professional, efficient, and effective. On the other are people to whom such change is a threat. Which road is your agency walking? What will it take to change direction?

photo credit: Simon Blackley

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.

Wikis can be used for public or internal messaging

From the Hawaiian word for “fast,” the wiki is perhaps best exemplified in Wikipedia… but is not limited to the long, sprawling, and not always accurate encyclopedic entries found there.

At least one law enforcement agency is using it as a way of both public and internal messaging, in the kind of model that might just make a team approach to social media easier for administrators to consider.

Public outreach

Readers who have visited “About You” will recognize John Fulton’s name from the comments. Administrative sergeant with the St. Clair County (Illinois) Sheriff’s Office, Fulton has been handling social media efforts including the agency blog.

The department website’s wiki takes Frequently Asked Questions a step further, not in terms of content, but in terms of platform. Found at http://sheriff.pbworks.com/, the wiki is maintained by both Fulton and one of the patrol sergeants, his predecessor at the administrative desk.

A mix of conventional FAQ-type information and longer articles from the news or the blog, the wiki took about a month to build “on and off,” says Fulton. Now running, it takes very little time to maintain.

Internal messaging

What has been more useful, Fulton says, is the agency’s internal wiki, which he uses to post general orders. “We decided to use a wiki because the first time general orders come out, someone always complains about something that’s wrong,” he explains. “Then emails and paper have to be passed around for approvals.”

The wiki, however, gives all the supervisors and commanders the chance to make changes as they see fit. “There’s a revision history, so if they come back and say ‘I didn’t mean to post that,’ it’s clear that they did,” Fulton says.

Officers do not have access, but can see all orders via PDF and then ask their supervisors questions if need be. It’s possible to track that they reviewed the PDF—and recently, they’ve even been able to incorporate quizzes so that officers can show they are paying attention.

These measures are important because of the reliance on a technology which has been criticized for its “too many cooks” collaborative ideal.  Still, as Wikipedia itself notes:

The Wikipedia model allows anyone to edit, and relies on a large number of well-intentioned editors to overcome issues raised by a smaller number of problematic editors. It is inherent in Wikipedia’s editing model that poor information can be added, but over time quality is anticipated to improve in a form of group learning as editors reach consensus, so that substandard edits will very rapidly be removed. This assumption is still being tested, and its limitations and reliability are not yet a settled matter.

St. Clair’s model, then, makes sense because it preserves and supports the chain of command. Patrol officers are notorious for complaining about policy that doesn’t fit their reality on the streets, but staying on top of their edits could end up taking more time. They should, however, be able to approach their supervisors to make changes.

The technical stuff

“For a small department with no IT department, we have to be able to do what we can with off-the-shelf and free stuff,” Fulton says. “If we had to buy a system, we wouldn’t have it.”

One thing that has been useful, however, is Fulton’s relationship with the county IT administrator, who not only built the internal wiki but also created the quizzes and a couple of other department tools. “He liked the challenge of meeting our needs,” says Fulton.

Although he can’t estimate how much time the wiki saves, Fulton says he definitely spends less time working on general orders. That frees him to work on other administrative tasks, including other elements of the St. Clair SO’s social strategy.

In what ways could your agency benefit from wikis?

Image: blogefl vi Flickr