Social Media in Law Enforcement: From Hierarchy to Collaborative

This post, by Amber Naslund at Altitude, highlights what may be the scariest aspect of social media: the need to give up control. Social media is neither vertical nor horizontal, Amber writes:

It’s a business model that – if deployed well – permeates the very structure and practice of a business. It doesn’t just trickle down a spreadsheet into someone’s budget or list of accomplishments. It’s not a checklist.

Giving Up Control

That permeating effect makes it inherently scary to paramilitary, hierarchical law enforcement agencies. As in many businesses, it’s unheard of for more than the public information office to have anything to do with talking directly to customers.

But not only because it means giving up control of the official message. There’s a deeper issue, a moral issue. Cops see humanity stripped from people every day, and the kind of voyeurism discussed in this article is an ugly reminder. Writes Paul Carr:

Two weeks ago, I wrote here about how the ‘real time web’ is turning all of us into inhuman egotists. How we’re increasingly seeing people at the scene of major accidents grabbing their cellphones to capture the dramatic events and share them with their friends, rather than calling 911.

But Tearah Moore, he takes pains to mention, is not an inhuman egotist:

Certainly, looking at her MySpace page and her Twitter account (before the army finally forced her to lock it down) we see the portrait of a patriot…. In tweeting from the scene, and calling out the media for not reporting the rumours from inside the base, I’m sure she genuinely believed she was helping get the real truth out, and making an actual difference.

For police, it’s not as simple as what Amber writes, “The customers that we say we are trying to connect with do not care what our job description is or what department we work for. They care that we want to bring them inside the walls and make them a vital part of our business.”

Tweeting on the Job

When it comes to police, the public does care about job descriptions. They care that patrol officers won’t be tweeting about their motor vehicle crash, that dispatchers will stay on task as they take 911 calls. It goes back to the higher standard which police are sworn to uphold. Indeed, Carr was later quoted by ABC News as saying, “Twitter about your life when you’re not on the base. The moment you put on the uniform, stop Twittering.”

And yet the public also cares about being made a vital part of police work. Hence the popularity of citizen academies. Civilians like being “in the know.” So an overly restrictive social media policy won’t work either.

Take, for example, the type and frequency of information sharing going on recently at a conference in the United Kingdom. Was he being rude, wondered author Bill Thompson, or bringing important and valuable information to others?

Sharing Information Constantly

A social media policy needs to take into account not only official messages, and not only consequences for unofficial messages, but also for the times when social media can bring people together—police with police, police with civilians.

After all, information sharing is frequently necessary to get the job done, to make changes at whatever level. Emergency response to numerous disasters has made that clear, to the extent that public safety vendors have worked hard to make software, two-way radios, and computers able to communicate seamlessly.

Focus on the Positives

In the end, it isn’t social media that’s scary. It’s the power of messy human creativity. The more law enforcement officers use social media frequently, the easier it will become for them to confuse what “making the world a better place” really means.

And so it isn’t just a matter of making policy, but of constant training—training as integral as officer safety practices and procedures. What to do and when to do it; what not to do and when not to do it; how to tell the difference.

Only by focusing on both positive and negative can officers start to figure out the best ways to use the tools to enhance their own creativity. And only at that point can police departments start to include social media in a way which, as Amber writes:

Collaboration is not just a feel-good buzzword. It’s the idea that our business is built more efficiently through shared knowledge, and shared responsibility. That multiple disciplines work together in order to see – from varied angles of expertise – how an organization works and can excel. What it’s challenges are. How to allocate resources, solve problems, innovate. Together.

Christa M. Miller is founder and co-author of Cops 2.0. A freelance trade journalist turned public relations and social media consultant, she has specialized in public safety issues for the past eight years. She resides in Greenville, SC and can be reached at christammiller@gmail.com.

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Tagged as: Amber Naslund, Bill Thompson, collaboration, communication, community policing, concerned citizens, cops 2.0, creativity, Facebook, hierarchies, information sharing, law enforcement, law enforcement tools, Paul Carr, police, public information, social media, social networking, technology, Twitter, web 2.0