Central to Toronto Police Services’ success: careful planning and execution before, during, and even after the summit. Cops 2.0 authors Laura Madison and Christa Miller talked with three people heavily involved in these activities – Marco Battilana, Constable Wendy Drummond, and Sgt. Tim Burrows.

Planning: People

During the G20, the Public Information Unit (PIU)‘s normal approach to communication – one Burrows calls “multi-pronged,” involving both internal and external public relations – changed.

“A multi member team made up of representatives from the Integrated Security Unit (ISU) Partners and many police services across Ontario formed the information team,” says Burrows. “We all worked together across mainstream and social media venues to bring up to date information to all members of our communities.”

The TPS officers’ roles did not change by much. Although all can use social media in the course of their duties, only two – Burrows and Constable Scott Mills – focus their energy on its use. (Burrows, who works with the Traffic Services Unit, describes his role as “parallel” to the PIU.)

“Scott Mills has been identified as the Social Media Officer for the Service and he works in the PIU offices with the other Media Relations and Public Information Officers,” Burrows says. During the G20, Burrows and Mills were assigned social media tasks, each officer working a 12-hour shift so that the TPS could provide 24-hour coverage and monitoring of social media platforms.

Likewise, the other officers generally stuck with their usual tasks. For example, Drummond says her role as media relations officer makes her more hands-on: “responsible for liaising with the media on a daily basis, providing updates on current investigations, and creating public safety alerts to ensure the public is armed with information to which they can adjust their own actions and decisions.”

But because the TPS was part of a much larger ISU, these roles still needed the guidance of someone skilled in directing large-scale public communications efforts. That fell to Marco Battilana, a web communication strategist with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) E Division. In that role for about two years, Battilana had been called to Vancouver to assist the ISU in charge of the 2010 Winter Olympics.

Overseer of both internet and intranet environments, he had developed the V2010 ISU website and social media presences from scratch, maintained the intranet site, and monitored and reported on each environment’s analytics, along with other duties. These duties were similar to what he does for the RCMP E Division, where he also trains media relations officers on content management.

The experience led to his being called on for the Toronto ISU. “With V2010 ISU, I already had an idea of what types of social media personas there would be: Supportive Government Partners, Anti-Establishment, enthusiasts, media, etc.

“Even before 2010, I had already been monitoring Beijing 2008’s social media efforts and was formulating how to improve. Having an idea of the different personas definitely helped me with planning my G8 / G20 experience and how the G8 / G20 ISU Public Affairs Communications Team (PACT) could have a positive influence for all involved.”

Battilana’s role, then, was not so much one of authority as one of guidance. “We all did the same social media monitoring when it came to the duties at the time,” he explains. “I merely gave my suggestions based on my expertise and experience.

“The other members had already established the social media monitoring and it was working very well. I simply wanted to take it one step further and be truly interactive with the public: [to achieve] two-way communication between the G8 / G20 ISU and the public and/or media.

“Scott and Tim were a great asset as they had already been living and breathing this. Their Twitter and Facebook accounts were already doing what I thought the G8 / G20 ISU should be doing, so it simply solidified the success of what was to come.”

Planning: The Event

The G20 was, perhaps not coincidentally, planned to immediately follow the G8 summit. However, says Drummond, while the city had plenty of time to plan for the G8, police were only notified of the G20 plans in February 2010.

“With not as much time to prepare as there was for the G8, planning went into full speed ahead,” she says. “Communications was key, and working with the communities that were going to be affected directly as a result of their proximity to the Metro Convention Centre, was paramount.

Despite TPS’ documented success with social media use, the ISU had little to draw on in terms of other G20 responders’ experiences. Nevertheless, says Drummond, “We knew that we were going to have to reach thousands of people to deliver several messages prior to and during the summits, and that is where social media assisted our Public Affairs Communications Team.”

This, she adds, ended up being one of the few things about back-to-back summits that was not costly and challenging. “Through the use of social media, we were able to communicate effectively out of one location, and social media, as you know, can be done anywhere, at anytime, reaching a large number of people, all at once.”

Exercises are important to planning for emergency or other critical situations. Historically, they include traditional media (including misinformation) and other elements that make for a scenario that is as accurate as possible.

However, while G20 exercises mentioned social media, practical exercises were not included. “This is a type of training that could be used to effectively answer questions to unforeseen problems and train officers to recognize the best practices to dealing with issues that could come up during real events,” Burrows acknowledges.

On the other hand, says Drummond, many elements of communication during the G20 were unexpected. “Being able to respond to questions and inform people as to what to expect is a lot different then dealing with public reaction and criticism,” she explains.

“Some of the messaging that we expected to be an issue with the public was not, and other issues felt to be moot became daily topics! Such as the removal of small trees to allow for the helicopter to land.”

Battilana, at the time still involved with the V2010, could not directly participate in the pre-event planning. Still, he says, “The PACT communication plan initially mirrored the V2010 ISU social media plan. When I arrived, I made some suggestions for monitoring. Tweetdeck was currently being used by the social media team, which worked. I suggested also using Hootsuite as a primary monitoring tool, which we did with great success. Facebook to Twitter was also utilized.”

While the use of these tools was so successful that Battilana says he would continue in the same vein, he cautions against overdependence on them. “What’s more important is keep on top of what tools are being used at the time. Who knows what will be around in five years. The key is to stay aware.”

Addressing violence and public anxiety

Protestor violence in other cities meant that in Toronto, messaging would have to take high emotions into account. “Social media was known to have been in use by protestors, both peaceful and not in previous summits,” says Burrows, “so its use was recognized as a valuable communication tool from the very beginning. [We used it] to monitor protest movements, inform and educate the public and to answer concerns and questions.”

One key example: “A couple of weeks prior to the G20, the ISU held a Technical Briefing, putting on display the many specialized units and equipment that was expected to be used, including the controversial LRAD [Long Range Acoustic Device],” says Drummond.

“This briefing was very beneficial as it somewhat set the stage for what people could expect to see, and really, be able to get their heads around the fact that there was gong to be such a large increase of police presence on the streets of Toronto.”

Burrows adds: “The information we gave to the public about the LRAD was designed to show how it is a very effective communication tool in times of mass gatherings where clear communication is so important.”

“This generated much discussion and talk on social media sites,” says Drummond. “We posted a lot of video explaining the duties and responsibilities of the different units, and the function of LRAD. This also in turn allowed the public to express their concerns and distrust in the use of the LRAD.”

Which, says Burrows, there was plenty of. “The public was very concerned about the use of the LRAD from what they saw at the Pittsburgh G20 summit. The ISU was intent on letting the public know that we were going to use it for communication and not as a weapon. Our plans never varied and as people understood the use of the tool and how the ISU was to use it, the fear was truly unfounded.”

Ultimately, says Drummond, planning for social media use need not be complicated. “As a law enforcement agency we fall within the realm of public safety and are required to abide by certain guidelines and requirements, but the forum in which the information is delivered is unique and needs to be specific to address individual audiences in order to maximize the effectiveness of the communications,” she explains.

For example, Battilana adds, says Police Services’ emphasis on two-way social media communication was much more developed than it had been for V2010. “The response was something that I wanted to see happen just like how the PACT would release media lines,” he explains. “We’d have the same vetting, approval and release, except not as verbose. Really though, it all comes down to effective communication. And that’s what the PACT was wanting to achieve with SM, and I believe that is what we all did.”

Social Media During the G20

Social tools were not only valuable as communications modes. They also proved critical for intelligence-gathering and investigations. “Being able to provide information confidentially to police through different social media sites has increased the amount of tips received,” says Drummond.

“On the flip side to that, people have a tendency to have tunnel vision when posting things on sites, feeling faceless and untraceable. It is with those postings that we were able to use our talent and use the information posted to our advantage. It allowed our officers to monitor public sites that protestors were using to share information.”

Battilana adds, “The tips that came in before and during [the summits] were hit or miss. Some were factual and some were not. We still managed to follow up on all the information we received.

“It definitely became more of a challenge for the PACT the closer to the summit we got. As the summit was more on the public’s mind, we’d end up with more and more social media activity. Hence, we really had to focus on disseminating the incoming information.”

How physical locations impacted communication

Two complicating factors: first, PACT staff were not all located in Toronto; they were also posted in the Ontario cities of Barrie and Huntsville. Second, Drummond notes that with regard to Huntsville and Toronto particularly, communications had to take into account very different demographics.

“Toronto, being a very urban setting, the majority of the population is tech savvy and the use of social media is much more prevalent,” she explains. “Huntsville, however, is a smaller town, where the population is older and reliant on traditional forms of media such as TV, radio and print.”

To deal with such disparate modes of communication, police went slightly lower tech: the telephone. “We had two phone numbers, one for the media and one for the public,” says Drummond. These calls came into Toronto, where the phones were manned 24 hours. “The responses were coordinated with PACT members in Barrie to maintain continuity with responses given by Toronto media officers and those posted in Huntsville.”

Burrows was one of the officers posted to Toronto. “The call volume was extremely heavy during the summits but during the G20 in particular,” he says. “While maintaining the continuity with a mass team will always be a challenge, our call centre supervisors held regular briefings and we were in constant contact with the ISU communications team leadership to ensure that we were all on the same page at all times.”

Managing communications breakdowns

Drummond says the most frustrating part of her experience involved breakdowns in communication. “Being in a position were you speak on behalf of the ISU is one that comes with the expectation of perfection, which is far from ever happening,” she explains. “No matter how you deliver some information, it will always be scrutinized and twisted.

“The amount to which you are able to control and rectify this, and continue to deliver the message that you want to be heard, is the challenge. Something that I learned very quickly in all of the G20 was how fast people post information, regardless of whether it had been verified or not. You may end up spending a lot of time correcting such postings!”

Roundtable discussions ensured message accuracy, and also helped communicators anticipate questions “to minimize the surprise moments,” says Burrows. “Accuracy always has to win out over immediacy. There is no problem verifying what live media may be showing. It’s obvious by the pictures what is happening.

“The danger is when the media or the public leads the information stream and looks for verification on their perspective, as opposed to deterring the facts and providing the most accurate information from the voices of authority.”

Drummond says that this is an opportunity for an aspect of the job that is most rewarding: “Being misquoted or having your comments be taken out of context is a great place for social media to step in. When you have written something and posted it publicly reduced the ability to alter your message.”

The worth of social media during large-scale events

Battilana agrees. “In my opinion, I think the PACT definitely achieved our objective of effective communications, in relation to a social media perspective. As more news agencies started to continuously follow us via social media as the summit drew near, we were able to have more of an influence on what the media were portraying.

“An example being people tweeting that the security fence was breached at a specific location, which then showed up on a certain news channel. Once we looked up the location referenced in the tweet, we realized that the location didn’t even have a security fence present. So, we tweeted that there was no fence breach occurring, as there was no fence at that location, and the news updated their report.”

This, Battilana adds, typifies how social media proved its worth. “I’ve seen people try to quantify the exact return on investment of social media when planning, and I believe this is why some people don’t believe in its influence,” he says.

“If we could achieve these types of results in regards to the G8 /G20 and what the mainstream media was reporting on in the matter of a week, just imagine what continued success we could have in the future. All it takes is someone with the courage and vision to see the true benefits of social media and to have the right people execute the plan accordingly.”

Drummond agrees. “Having a well established following, experienced and knowledgeable communicators, and a Service that recognizes the value in social media and its importance was key to the success of social media during the summits of 2010,” she says.

“Without the experience and following that both Tim and Scott have as figures in law enforcement, I don’t think we would have been as successful in reaching so many people and engaging them in dialogue or just making people aware of preparations and planning.”

To these thoughts adds Burrows: “One important point to remember is that there will always be members of society that don’t agree with anything that law enforcement does. That becomes intensified and multiplied with political events.

“It is paramount to recognize that you will never be able to appease everyone. The difference between five years ago and today is that social media have made it possible for those people to gather together on line and increase their voice and their position. Law enforcement must do the same, work together, increase our voice and always present the truth with accuracy and transparency.”

photo credit: steelerdan

photo credit: steelerdan

photo credit: PastePie

photo credit: OMouse

photo credit: Aramil Liadon

photo credit: Subterranean Tourist Board

How well will you understand officers in other agencies when you need each other?

Fifteen years ago when I was a police Explorer in New Hampshire, I remember quite a debate over using 10 codes vs. plain English. 10 codes protected information from nosy reporters and civilians; plain English was less confusing for emergency responders, especially during incidents requiring multi-jurisdictional response.

All are arguments coming up yet again, as some agencies debate over whether to switch to plain English radio communications. In the years following 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, as this NPR story points out, many have already switched; this PoliceOne.com article furthermore points out:

In December 2006 the National Incident Management System (NIMS) issued an alert mandating that first responders use plain language in multi-jurisdictional, multi-agency response. The Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Office of Emergency Communications (OEC) established the Plain Language Working Group in April 2009.

What does this have to do with social media?

David Konig at PIO Social Media Training notes, with regard to blogs:

While your target audience may understand specialized language, acronyms, and regional slang it is important to remember that they will not be the only ones looking at what you create. Not communicating using common terms will limit the ability for your message to be understood by a broader audience.

Jargon is easy to slip into for a variety of reasons. You can’t think of how else to describe something, or you’re talking to someone else who you know (or think you know) will understand what you mean, or – subconsciously – you may even be trying to show you belong to a certain group.

But think about the points raised by former prosecutor and trainer Val Van Brocklin in this Officer.com article about cops “talking funny” on the stand. “When you talk like that,” she writes, “you sound like somebody who’s full of himself or who’s trying to hide the truth in a mountain of syllables – both are stereotypes we do NOT need to be reinforcing with jurors.”

Making the switch

Transitioning to plain English has been difficult for law enforcement agencies. It’s been talked about for at least 15 years if not longer, took five years after 9/11 for NIMS to create a directive, and another three years after that for the OEC to establish the working group.

So don’t expect to be able to to use it right away in your blog or podcast. It may even seem unnatural after years of speaking an almost legalese-type “language.” But do practice. Van Brocklin’s approach: practice with flash cards. Write one jargon phrase on the front, and a plain-English phrase on the back. Practice with your spouse or even a child.

For a blogger, though, this may not be enough. Certainly, the spoken word can reinforce the written, and vice versa. But if you plan to write regularly, you should practice writing too.

Creative writing teachers sometimes give an exercise: write something from the point of view of a person who is explaining an incident to their best friend, their mother, their spouse, their boss, a group of strangers, and yes, the police.

The exercise is meant to put a writer more solidly into the mind of the character he’s writing. But for a blogger, it should put you more solidly in your reader’s minds. Because you’re writing (or podcasting) for all those people, to get them to really think about what you say, you need to speak in terms they understand best.

How often do you slip into jargon? Can you practice “plain English” at least once per day?

Image: chargrillkiller via Flickr

Listening provides insights, sometimes unexpectedly

This blog by a Portsmouth (Virginia) civilian points up how valuable the concept of “listening” is to modern police departments—all departments, not just those who are engaging the public on social networking sites.

At the very least, rudeness is a common complaint among civilians. “That cop acted like he didn’t get his donut this morning,” they might say of an officer who stopped them for speeding. Worse, even acting totally within policy might land you in USA Today.

Either way, there is no explaining that officers have good and bad days like anyone else, that policies are in place for good reasons. The uniform is all they see. And as one Twitter followee put it: “When customers complain, they are first looking to be validated. Remember that before saying ‘sorry it’s policy.’”

It’s easy to get defensive, to use misunderstanding as an excuse to insulate oneself and one’s agency from legitimate criticism. But the beauty of the Internet is that no one has to know you’re listening.

Value in listening alone

Listening doesn’t only enable you to gauge your agency’s general reputation both within and outside of your community. It also helps you assess current events. Take, for instance, this rundown of the recent Toronto storm. I was struck in particular by these paragraphs:

As weather stations forecast the storm earlier in the day, there was a brief spike in conversation in the morning. Conversation related to the tornadoes themselves began to erupt around 6pm….

Another noticeable feature is the second spike in conversation later in the evening. The storm was well away from Toronto by this point; this spike represented people discussing their experiences and posting photos and videos they had collected during the episode.

And:

Not surprisingly, with Twitter being the golden child of the moment, especially for time-sensitive updates, micromedia comprised almost three-quarters of the conversation relating to tornadoes. Blogs made up 13 per cent, while images captured by people comprised 10 per cent of the conversation.

This is a substantial departure from the day as a while, during which nearly 40 per cent of the conversation about Toronto occured on blogs and a similar amount occurred on Twitter. A useful reminder that while Twitter is high-profile, on a day-to-day basis much conversation happens elsewhere.

(I bolded the text above.) Click through to the full post—it comes complete with graphs showing usage patterns.

Given that people now rubberneck incident scenes with camera phones in hand, listening has immediate value to most everything a law enforcement agency does. So how do you listen?

Listening tools

Chris Brogan’s method of aggregating RSS feeds (described in two separate posts, here and here) may be the simplest.

Still too complicated? Plan to move towards aggregate RSS feeds, but start with Google Alerts. They’re easy to set up for mentions of your town: Greenville + “South Carolina,” Portland + Maine, Pittsburgh + G20.

Tack on the words “police” and/or “crime” or some other related term if you wish, but consider staying general, getting a feel for what’s going on in the area as a whole—or at least, online public perception of what’s going on.

Search Twitter and Google News on local issues: police contract negotiations, discontent with a political or business issue (say, Wal-Mart moving in), public reaction to a high-profile crime (and police response to it), even traffic patterns (especially if you’re running targeted patrols in certain areas). Monitter allows you to search Twitter on three simultaneous terms; Backtype allows you to track blog comments via keywords.

Whether Google Alerts or targeted searches, remember to refine your efforts. Some search terms may be too narrow, others too broad. Change them up as your needs change, as new issues arise.

Need more? A comprehensive (and regularly updated) list of monitoring tools is available. Take a week or two to explore each site, then propose which solutions would best fit your agency.

What needs listening to in your community?

Image: keela84 via Flickr

Cops are taught, by and large, to steer clear of the media. The PIO or a commanding officer handles them at critical incidents, and “regular” cops must get permission before speaking to reporters.

So what happens when an untrained officer finds himself in a media interview? Some (I speak from experience) do a great job. Others, like Crowley, find themselves so severely disadvantaged that if this were a street fight, they’d be in the gutter. As Baron writes:

What did he do wrong. One, he said he wasn’t going to say anything–then he said exactly what they hoped he would…. He kept engaging them–they did a great job, just like a good telemarketer, of keeping him engaged. You could see his guard dropping further and further and then they went in for the kill: will you apologize. And that’s where he made his headline-creating mistake. He not only said no, emphatically no, in effect hell no, he said he never would and when asked if it meant losing his job, he spoke for his department by saying it ain’t going to happen, won’t ever happen.

What does this have to do with social media?

In my opinion, the more officers are familiar with people and how they transmit information among one another online, the better they will understand what people are looking for and how they want to receive it.

Notice, by the way, that I didn’t say officers have to engage with people. It’s preferable, of course—to become part of information dissemination—but I’d argue that simply watching works too. It’s like how constant reading teaches a writer how to write, almost via osmosis. You learn to figure out why something clicks for you, how sentence structure and word choice and many other “tricks” come together to form truly great writing.

Why is this important? Because pure information sharing is a different form of communication than what most cops are used to. It’s not about getting people to explain their problems, or obey your instructions. It’s finding out what’s going on. Not unlike getting incident data via CAD, in some ways.

Authentic communication promotes authority

Even more importantly, however, social media can help non-media-trained officers learn how to channel a quality that’s lacking in most “canned” media interviews: authenticity. This is a point, in fact, that Baron brings up in a blog entry from three years ago:

The point is to be effective you have to be open and honest, trustworthy, responsive and communicate effectively the messages important to your organization, and do this while being totally yourself. The ones who do very well at this succeed on all counts. But it ain’t necessarily easy.

These values are inherent in social media. Marketers and public relations people who help businesses learn social media talk constantly about authenticity, honesty, responsiveness, being yourself even when representing your organization. These are perhaps, then, the most important takeaways for law enforcement officers.

Not many officers will end up in Sgt. Crowley’s position, but in an age where information is expected as rapidly as it’s demanded, preparation isn’t a bad thing. No, you don’t want officers at an incident scene all telling their own versions of what’s happening. There’s a reason the current model works.

And social media cannot be a substitute for proper media training, just as social media-savvy officers shouldn’t be chosen as PIOs just because they “get” the online culture. As Baron points out, it takes the right mix of personality and communication skills along with training.

Still, the shift commanders and supervisors need to be better prepared. “No comment” doesn’t cut it anymore; people think you’re covering something up. Also, future PIOs will come out of this crop of officers. The more officers have the chance to learn how to talk to the public—via the media or not—the stronger the pool administrators have to pull from.

“Authentic” and “authority” have the same root word: autos, Greek for “self.” Communicating with authenticity, from one’s own self, provides and promotes authority—the thing no law enforcement officer should be short of, on the street or in an interview.

Image: Ernst Moeksis via Flickr

It’s a valid point. Committing already-thin resources to something that may not pay off in significant community engagement doesn’t seem to make sense.

Comcast’s emphasis on quality—not quantity

But then I read this interview at marketing and social media expert Valeria Maltoni’s blog.  Comcast Customer Service Manager Frank Eliason, long applauded for his efforts on Twitter and elsewhere, replied to Valeria’s question about whether his work with “one sliver of the Comcast customer base” had had a positive effect overall:

–It is hard to say, because we are doing so much to improve the Customer experience throughout the organization, that positive improvement truly highlights all of those efforts. I think the preferred measurement for the C-Suite has been how we have taken what we have learned from Customers and truly improved the experience for all Customers.

–Unlike typical measurements of performance, my team is measured on effectiveness and improvements they make for our Customers. I teach them to be proactive and find solutions to problems they encounter. If something is broken for others they are encouraged to find solutions.

In fact, social media as a means to communicate with small market segments is catching on all over the corporate world. This article detailed the way in which food makers are responding to “a niche the industry would once have dismissed as too small to target profitably.”

Not only are the companies changing their existing products and processes; they’re also investing in new products: “For a while, the larger companies said, ‘We’ll let someone else do it, and then buy them if they’re any good,’” said Bill Bishop, chairman of consulting group Willard Bishop. “Now it’s become evident that you give up too much in opportunity by letting it get developed by the smaller players.”

How long can you afford to wait?

Law enforcement agencies may do well to pay attention. It strikes me that many are, indeed, waiting to see what happens with the neighboring and other agencies using social media to reach out to customers. But civilians are online now, and the social ‘net is constantly changing, growing.

In the 9 months since I’ve been on Twitter, for example, I’ve seen law enforcement use skyrocket from just a handful of agencies and cops to—well, a lot, enough to form communities among patrol officers and digital forensics people and even some of the “official” agency pages, the PIOs who are inclined to follow each other.

It follows that other members of your community are joining, if not Twitter, then Facebook, LinkedIn, and any one of a hundred other social networks. Sure, that number may be small. It may stay small. But 1) how would you know unless you yourself were online? And 2) historically, often the smallest groups effect the greatest changes.

What small step can you take toward Web engagement today?

Image: me’nthedogs via Flickr

Point well made. Especially in light of this article from the U.K. Overwhelmingly positive in its portrayal of social media’s ability to start groundswells of citizen support and action, the article made a brief mention of law enforcement protest monitoring:

The principles of “flashmobbing” – impromptu gatherings of people, arranged by text message, for mass pillow fights or silent discos – is now being used by protesters too. It allows large groups of people to gather in one place at short notice before the authorities have the chance to block their efforts.

… In the weeks leading up to the G20 summit, the police have been monitoring these sites in an effort to stay one step ahead of the protesters. One senior officer warned it could turn in to a “cat and mouse” game around the streets of London, with police trying to stop incidents, organised hastily and online, as they flare up.

So yes. I do see the point of not following your followers back. However much respect the public may have for police, however much they support enforcement of laws, a person’s choice to engage in activities based on deeply held beliefs is a matter of First Amendment rights.

The need for monitoring

Yet mass protests are still a matter of public safety. At the very least, large crowds have the ability to block traffic. At worst, you get the 1999 World Trade Organization riots. Crowd control is necessary, and to control it, you have to know where it is.

So, while it may not be advisable to follow the most vocal of tweeting protesters, agencies that anticipate a large crowd of any kind—missing-child vigil, or post-athletic event celebrations—may want to stay on top of Twitter.

This can be done using both hashtags and generic terms, such as the names of prominent hubs where people may be drawn to congregate (street and/or building names), event/individual names, and so on. (Remember that not everyone remembers to use a hashtag; generic terms can be misspelled; not everyone follows the same conventions, for instance using both G-20 and G20.)

Don’t have time to devote to staying on top of manual searches? Use a service like Monitter, which pulls in tweets based on up to three user-defined search terms. A brand-new service, Yahoo! Sideline, allows you to customize groups according to a variety of keywords. In other words, just as you might use TweetDeck to group “PDs” you follow, Sideline would let you group a series of keywords or phrases.

Protecting everyone’s rights

It’s likely that at least some members of the public will still call this “Big Brother.” But if using social media is about listening to your customers—the people who benefit from your products and services—then it should be possible to back up your reasoning with a well-thought-out blog entry or editorial. Monitoring a protest enables faster response to criminal activities that do take place; monitoring a vigil for a crime victim may help catch the perpetrator. In short, it’s a way to ensure everyone’s rights remain secure.

Image: Rev Dan Catt via Flickr

What I found: in short, if outsourcing hands off a project to a single individual or business, then crowdsourcing hands off—if not a project—then an element of a project to an entire group: a customer base, a community.

The idea started with open source software projects. If you use the Firefox web browser, you know that all the different toolbars and other add-ons are the result of programmers using existing code to create specific tools for others to use.

The idea has grown, too. It has its pitfalls—Wikipedia, cited as the best known example of crowdsourcing, has also been criticized for inaccuracies—but in the business world, is even closer to participatory democracy than the focus group. That makes it a concept more government agencies should pay attention to.

So what does this have to do with crime prevention?

J.D. Lasica blogged about a very recent case in which a community came together to track down a bomb threat:

About six or seven historians and librarians tracked down the user ID and other information about the teenager who made the threat. They then used Twitter to exchange information and ideas about what steps to take.

In short, it was an online version of other recent incidents, in which customers and employees at two Starbucks coffee shops—one in Virginia and the other in Florida—intervened in somewhat violent thefts.

In another (somewhat more controversial) example, border patrol has been crowdsourced. But we’ll save that for another blog.

Do cops know they’re crowdsourcing?

More interesting than the fact that social media was used to catch the would-be bomber was the fact that first responders didn’t seem equipped to deal with the incoming calls:

McLellan phoned the St. Louis Police Department — which sent her to voicemail. She persisted but the officer said he “did not have access to the Web” and didn’t know how to get on the Web…. McLellan, a history professor at Wright State University in Ohio, then called a nearby police department known for being smart about cybercrime.

The SLPD’s response thereafter was swift; they did exactly what they were trained to do. But their initial response points up how important it is to begin to train regular patrol officers on how to handle social media.

In fact, dealing with high-tech crime in general has been an ongoing problem for cops who specialize in this area. Officers removing batteries from cell phones, for instance, believing that they were preserving memory (and thus, evidence), but instead wiping it clean. Officers accessing hard drives, altering evidence without meaning to.

Calls that come in based on Web sites, then, are not much different. True, most (as in child exploitation, or cyber harassment) will be referred to detectives.

But the more Web 2.0 empowers citizens to perceive that they have a fundamental ability to make a difference in events they witness, the more calls like this will come into police departments.

So, while leaders have the legitimate fear that Web access will be abused, they may need to take the risk of allowing at least limited access to officers to check out tips. Your take?

Image: .rGz via Flickr

Controlling public information during a critical incident used to be, if not easy, then at least somewhat predictable. Police and other emergency responders’ relationship with the media could dictate whether reporters transmitted (or did not transmit) the appropriate messages—or rumors.

The Internet, and especially the advent of social media, has changed that predictability. The best relationship between authorities and local media now has no bearing on what civilians transmit—for better or worse.

Human interaction, or manipulation?

A number of bloggers put this into relief following the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. There, civilian use of Twitter not only documented the catastrophe for the rest of the world, but also told the terrorists where and how the police moved. Security researcher Nitesh Dhanjani took this a step or more further, speculating on how terrorists could actually have used Twitter to manipulate civilian responses.

Still, social media is far from a “necessary evil.” Consider, for example, that it can reduce the sense of panic among those who are involved, and those who are outside waiting for news. “Others weren’t locked down. We were told limited information, and this helped us learn what was happening outside of the room,” said instructional technology specialist Jim Groom of a lockdown at the University of Richmond.

“We could bounce off each other what we had known and what we had been told and find out what was going on at the campus at large.” This, he found comforting. “People were sending advice with what to do in a crisis situation, with links. Some friends wrote that they were doing a ‘safety dance’ for me. That stuff helped break up the tension.”

The balance of communication

Presumably this is the kind of response that can relieve some of the public-relations burden for incident responders, though it can create stress too. Of a bomb threat at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, the student newspaper’s editor-in-chief wrote,

“We had a few computers and we were posting breaking news to our website. We were having folks call any spokesmen or all the various police units and so forth to figure out what was going on. We had people walking around in pairs trying to figure out where, exactly, the barriers were where you could and couldn’t go.

“Over time they pushed further and further out on campus. By 10 I could tell we wouldn’t be able to wander around campus. There were a lot of police with big guns and they were getting increasingly irritated with us. They were trying to do their jobs and we were a bunch of kids trying to figure out what we could do.”

Making an all-hazard plan

No emergency response plan—large or small—should be made without taking social media into account. The Kennebec (Maine) Journal noted that schools now need “all-hazard” plans to deal with threats ranging from hostage or active shooter situations to chemical spills.

Given that many students have Web-enabled cell phones (even when school policy forbids them), it makes sense for an all-hazard plan to account for student Twitter use and text-messaging. So too for any other regional plan. Social media analyst Jeremiah Owyang has an excellent blog entry on how to do just that.

Has social network use during emergencies been discussed in your department? What are your thoughts?

Could the Bay Area Rapid Transit have found a better way to manage the public relations disaster that was the shooting of an unarmed black man? This is up for debate—BART says no, PR professionals interviewed for the Contra Costa Times say yes—but thanks to the proliferation of shooting footage on YouTube, the question bears examination.

What the PR pros say

The first press release took BART 2 ½ hours after the shooting to produce. This was enough, argue the PR pros, to make community members think a cover-up was going on. Why? Because they’d already seen the video on YouTube. Posted multiple times within minutes of the incident, the video showed all its viewers felt they needed to know.

BART was also, the pros noted, too slow to disclose that Officer Johannes Mehserle had declined to be interviewed the night of the incident. A faster response and better details were two strategies they felt should have been employed.

In its own defense, BART argued that the information they were receiving was constantly changing. Furthermore, just one media relations officer was on call that morning (they have since revised policy to make it two). And, they pointed out, legal issues made it difficult to comment on an ongoing investigation.

Viral vs. chain of command

The PR pros seemed certain that BART had acted with no strategy on how to deal with a crisis incident, but I wonder whether this is true. Government hierarchy—chain of command—is how most police departments deal with emergencies.

The alternative is to “empower” shift commanders and supervisors, even media relations personnel, to provide information themselves. Who wants to take responsibility for wrong information, or worse, for jeopardizing a criminal investigation?

Yet the fact remains that 2 ½ hours was just long enough for community members to start believing that BART was “stonewalling.” Police leaders therefore need to figure out a better strategy than relying on chain of command in critical incidents. Trust those lower on the chain to get information out there that is both accurate and appropriate? Prevent communication breakdowns altogether by developing strong long-term relationships with community members? Some combination of the two?

Most important is to keep the goal in mind: adapt to the increasing public expectation for on-demand information and dialogue.