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Just came across this great news story about CrimeReports from Fox 10 in Pensacola, Florida. Near the end a man who runs a community center comments that a map like our could harm people who live in high-crime areas. What are your thoughts?

James Gunter is the editor of The Crime Map and the director of social media for CrimeReports.com.

Get on the National Crime Map at CrimeReports.com

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Remember Bozeman? The Montana city with so much social media controversy? First, the town was called out all over the Web for demanding not only access to its employees’ social pages, but also their account passwords. Then, a Bozeman police officer resigned after public outcry over his poorly worded Facebook status update.

Bozeman police are again in the news, but not for social media. This time, the highlight is for an officer who went beyond his sworn duties to help a fellow human being—after he’d arrested him.

Mark Nichols at American Police Beat tells us that Officer Mark Ziegler arrested a man for shoplifting, who, it turned out, was stealing because he couldn’t afford to feed his family. After citing and releasing the man, writes Nichols, “Officer Ziegler made a quick stop at Wal-Mart where he picked up few frozen pizzas and delivered them to home of the man he had just arrested.”

Nichols goes on to write:

In a time when movie stars adopt humanitarian pet projects precisely to generate the kind of publicity Officer Ziegler didn’t care about, it’s nice to know that there are still some folks out there that show compassion to their fellow man simply because it’s the right thing to do.

Finding out who they are, not who they were

Ziegler isn’t unusual. Most law enforcement officers I know are “unsung heroes,” happy to help other cops and civilians—think about cops who replace stolen Christmas presents for children—but not believing they deserve any special attention for it.

And yet I can’t help thinking that far too often, we don’t find out just how special they are until we’re reading their obituaries. We grieve them as we read about their lives and look at their pictures. “What a terrible loss,” we say.

Does it have to be this way? Does it really protect our officers and their families to keep them hidden? What if, rather than box them into a set of rules about how they should and shouldn’t use social media, what they can and can’t say, we let them use their common sense about showing us their human sides?

They wouldn’t have to trumpet the good deeds which so many of them feel are a normal part of their jobs. In fact, allowing them to treat social media as an extension of those deeds—not as another channel, but as giving in and of itself—might just have an impact on crime rates.

Years ago when I first started writing for law enforcement trade magazines, I interviewed a school resource officer about the effect he had on his small community. One quote in particular stood out. He told me that he had made arrests where the juvenile offenders told him, “If I’d known it was you, I never would’ve done this.”

Personally feeding your community

Yeah, it’s anecdotal, but relationship- and community-building in the form of programs like Cease Fire are proven to reduce violence.

Jeremy Meyers, a professional with whom I connected via blogging and PR Twitter chats, recently wrote:

We get buried underneath our day-to-day strategizing, planning, brainstorming, trying to stave off unexpected results. We become afraid of surprises, so we try to plan for every contingency…. Slowly, the promise dies in a hailstorm of planning, structure and alienating language, and we end up with a social network presence nobody cares to visit, and we eat dinner alone in the dark.

It’s so important to take the time to flip it around, to think about feeding your communities, to connect and give whenever you can. It’s important for your own mental health, the well-being of your company, the popularity of your twitter account, the survival of the species on this planet.

Sanitizing officer experiences reduces the community power of social media. A 140-character tweet about an arrest for shoplifting is no different from a store patron seeing the cuffs go on as she passes by. But give the officer license to tweet, “This sucks. The guy was only trying to feed his family. Heading over there w/ pizza” and you allow the community to connect on a whole new level, perhaps even to offer to help the family themselves.

How can you allow officers to let the community get to know who they are?

Christa M. Miller is founder and co-author of Cops 2.0. A freelance trade journalist turned content creator and public relations strategist, 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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Last Sunday evening, officers were dispatched to investigate a call of an armed subject. When Aurora Police Department officers arrived on the scene, they concluded that is was domestic-related and subsequently surrounded the residence where it was purported that an armed male was held up.

More than a dozen police officers were present. They surrounded the residence, along with several other houses in the immediate vicinity. Officers heard a single gunshot ring out and immediately entered the home where they located a male with a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Prior to the gunfire, many concerned neighbors approached the officers who were set up on the perimeter and inquired what was happening. When something involving emergency personnel occurs in a neighborhood, it is common nature for the residents to be inquisitive.

The problem in this particular situation was that officers were being approached while the incident was in full throttle. The officers had knowledge of an armed man and were positioned outside the residence while a plan for entry was being formulated. My understanding is that a few neighbors were unnerved by the fact that the officers would not give them details about what was unfolding.

After speaking with a few officers who were on the scene, I realized that there were two very different perspectives on the scenario. The residents had a legitimate concern that there was an armed man loose in the neighborhood. The police were impatient with the neighbors because they were still gathering intelligence and waiting for direction. They were not pleased with the citizens who approached the scene to inquire, simply because of the obvious risk involved.

Through training and experience, police understand that people can be extremely unpredictable—especially in situations where emotions run high. This lack of predictability can result in danger for both the officers and those in the vicinity. The police assume that risk because they are equipped and trained to handle high-risk scenarios. What may seem like withholding or rudeness to a citizen may actually be an officer focused on the threat. Even while focused on one threat, an officer has to be heightened to all of his or her surroundings. If residents are approaching the officers, their attention is diverted.

In situations like this, the police officer’s responsibility to keep the public safe from harm will supersede an uninvolved citizen’s desire to know what is happening. Rest assured that if the residents were in any sort of danger, the police would have communicated such and gave clear and concise direction. Officers are instructed not to give any information to anyone at the scene and are encouraged to refer any inquiries to a supervisor or media relations. This is to protect the integrity of the investigation and those involved.

Keep in mind that there is also an element of privacy that should be taken into consideration. If it were your family member who was inside that house, my guess is that you would not want the police officers on the scene giving your neighbors the play by play. The police have a front row seat to the tragedies of life. With that, we have a responsibility to maintain confidentiality both for the investigation and out of respect for the individuals involved.

We often criticize what we don’t understand. It is my hope that the police can empathize with citizens who are fearful for their families and do their best to distribute information as soon as they are able. Conversely, my hope is that citizens gain a better understanding of policing and begin to understand that keeping you safe is our number one priority.

Kristen Ziman is a Lieutenant with the Aurora Police Department in Illinois. She holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Criminal Justice from Aurora University and a Master’s Degree in Criminal Justice Management from Boston University. She is a sixteen year veteran and has worked in various divisions including Community Oriented Policing, Domestic Violence Reduction Unit, Field Training and Patrol. Read her blog at http://beexceptional.blogspot.com/

Get on the National Crime Map at CrimeReports.com

Part of what makes a profession a profession—and not just a job—is that a professional is, or should always be, trying to grow in their job knowledge and skills. For me, part of this growth process involves lots and lots of reading. The web has exploded the availability of professional reading for crime analysts.

A while back I posted on using Google Alerts to search the web for news stories that interest you. Tools like Google Alerts, RSS feeds and email lists can generate tons of articles that you need to read. For me, I find that my workflow is best if I segregate activities like professional reading to certain times of the workday. But it seems like new stuff to read comes at me all throughout the workday. How best to generate a reading list for later in an easy, non-intrusive manner?

I found a cool new tool a couple of months ago that has really helped me to manage my reading list. This tool is Instapaper.

Instapaper bills itself as “A simple tool to save web pages for reading later.” If you have a long article you want to save for later, you can save it to Instapaper and go back to it later without having to keep up with a long, obscure URL.

Even better is the ability to strip out all the ads, irrelevant graphics and such and just read a simplified text version of your saved web page. This feature works hand in hand with the Instapaper iPhone app which can download your saved links for reading on your iPhone or iPad should you want to do your reading on these devices.

Part of what makes something like Instapaper useful, is the ease of getting your reading materials into it. This is an area where Instapaper really shines, you can install a bookmarklet in your web browser so when you find a page you want to save, you click the bookmarklet and the page is automatically added to your Instapaper account. You can also use the “Send To” function in Google Reader (one of my favorite ways to add items to Instapaper) or even email a URL or long email to Instapaper to get the articles into your account.

Once you’ve added articles to your account there are a number of ways to read your items. You can organize your articles into folders, “star” the important ones or your favorites and even subscribe to an RSS feed of them. You can view the original article with all the formatting or the text view.  You can also download or send a Kindle or other ebook reader file to your ebook reader for reading on those devices.

Instapaper has a couple of companion iPhone apps as well. Both a free one and a fuller featured paid app. Both iPhone apps have the ability to save your items for offline reading in case you’re in an area where Internet bandwidth is limited or you’re in airplane mode. The paid app has so many additional features such as folders, Twitter/Tumblr integration and more articles that I gladly plunked down the $4.99 for it.

Instapaper has been a great way for me to organize and keep up with my professional reading.

Scott Dickson is a crime analyst in Killeen, Texas. He blogs at The Crime Analyst’s Blog and can be reached via email at scott@crimeanalystblog.net

Get on the National Crime Map at CrimeReports.com

As the warm weather rolls around and the school year comes to an end, teenagers and young adults will find themselves attending proms, graduation ceremonies, and the accompanying parties. These rites of passage often include the consumption of alcohol. Attempting to ensure that their children are “safe” while drinking, some adults will allow their children to consume alcohol at their home.

These parents often justify this departure from their usual stance on underage drinking stating “at least I know s/he is home safe and not on the road.” The message seems to imply that either the only, or perhaps most important, reason for teenagers to abstain from alcohol is because of the dangers of drinking and driving.

While these dangers are certainly concerning, especially given teenagers relative inexperience with both alcohol consumption and driving, there are certainly other equally important reasons to discourage teenagers from consuming alcohol, and YET these reasons are rarely mentioned.

Social Host Laws

Last week the Chicago Tribune published a piece on the enactment of social host laws, local level ordinances that penalize adults who allow minors to consume alcohol or use drugs. Chicago’s law calls for jail time of up to six months for adults found guilty of allowing teens to drink or possess alcohol.

In Lake Forest, where adults face fines up to $2500, the law calls for penalties that increase with subsequent offenses. Lake County’s ordinance broadens the categories of adults who may be held accountable to include baby sitters and older siblings, in addition to parents; additionally, adults may be charged whether the party takes place in a home, banquet hall, boat or limousine. The enactment of local ordinances enhances the ability of local law enforcement to hold adults who enable underage drinking as the current state law only punishes adults if the teen drinking party results in an injury or death.

Objections

Interestingly enough, some, mostly affluent, localities chose to not pursue social drinking laws as they felt the debate would be too divisive. In Barrington Hills, Village President Robert Abboud stated that many parents in his town have well intentioned arguments: “If they are drinking in my barn, I know where they are, and they are not driving and I know they are safe.” But are they safe?

Well intentioned arguments such as these imply that the real danger here is drinking and driving. Are teenagers really safe once driving is removed from the equation or does alcohol use by teenagers pose other dangers? I can’t imagine that most parents of teenagers would endorse alcohol consumption by their underage children as long as they did not drive.

Other dangers of Underage Drinking

Alcohol clouds our decision making abilities. Given that the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for rational decision making, is not fully developed until our early twenties, teenagers are already at a disadvantage when it comes to making good decisions. Add alcohol to the mix and the ability to make good decisions for one’s health and safety is diminished. Not only does the consumption of alcohol affect one’s physical health in terms of brain development, it is also strongly linked with unprotected sex and an increased risk of physical and sexual violence.

Whether social host laws are the best way to diminish the risks of teenage alcohol consumption remains to be seen. While it is certainly arguable that it is not within the government’s purview to tell parents how to raise their children, it is important that society sends a strong and consistent message to teenagers about ALL of the consequences associated with alcohol consumption. I think that is something upon which we all can agree.

What’s your opinion? Are these laws a good way to deter underage drinking, or do they over step their bounds into the private lives of parents and children?

Meridith Spencer is an adjunct Professor of Criminal Justice and Sociology at Bridgewater State College and Fisher College and an advocate for public policy that is “smart on crime.” She can be reached at meras28@gmail.com or followed at www.twitter.com/meras28 .

I saw this video yesterday and I thought it would be fun to share it here. It’s a little animation about how police work will be in the future. Amazingly, a lot of this technology already exists, but hasn’t yet matriculated into the law enforcement system. I also think this is a pretty accurate picture of what policing might be like in 20 years or so (well, minus the jet packs and areal bikes).

James Gunter is the editor of The Crime Map and the director of social media for CrimeReports.com.

Get on the National Crime Map at CrimeReports.com

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I can always tell within minutes of an interview how media-friendly my source is. If they engage in small talk, that indicates that they’re interested in their interviewer. If they’re interested in me, and we establish a rapport, that makes it much more likely that they’ll volunteer information. They won’t stick rigidly to my questions, and in the silence that follows an answer, they’ll speak first. (Yes, cops too. Really! Surprised?)

What does this have to do with social media?

A police source who allows him- or herself to be engaged in more of a conversation with me than an interview recognizes the importance of putting information out there. They want the public to hear it, and they trust me to help them tell it.

Contrast that with a source who, for all intents and purposes, speaks only when spoken to, answers my questions in as short a period of time as possible, and doesn’t even seem to care when I give them a date for when the article is due to run. That’s if they even call me back to set up the interview to begin with.

Now, I’m fully aware that people are busy, have bad days/weeks/months, and also that sometimes there are personality clashes. I’m not here to discuss reasons. The fact is, sometimes sources don’t trust me.

And that’s fine. (Okay, it’s a little irritating when I’m on deadline and I have to scramble to find a backup source, but you know.) It does, however, give me pause. Does this officer not trust me because of an individual issue, or is it department culture to avoid media whenever possible?

In this age of instant, constant communication, any hesitation to work with media is a red flag. How a police department as a whole views the media is an indication, in my opinion, of how it views the public at large. If officers and administrators alike don’t trust media to tell the right story or tell it the right way, they simultaneously don’t trust the public to receive the story and interpret it the right way.

In other words, knowing that the media give the public what they want, a police department that fears inaccurate quotes and bad portrayal also fears a public with a low opinion of police. The problem is, media usually doesn’t create the problems. They might exacerbate tensions, but do you really think, in a town where police are respected, that a reporter trying to show otherwise would be taken seriously?

Police who don’t trust the media either know there’s a problem in their own ranks, or are irrationally afraid based on secondhand knowledge or experience. Either way, trying to convince them to “tell their own stories” via social media will be a swim against the current going uphill.

Does it have to be this way?

The agency genuinely trying to overcome a bad image has no choice but to become active in social media, as well as with traditional media, seeking to build relationships with both: take reporters and neighborhood leaders out for coffee, tap their knowledge about problems and concerns and use it to build a sound communication strategy.

The fearful risk-averse liability-conscious agency doesn’t necessarily need to be on social media, but because of its fearfulness, it is probably one critical or high-profile incident away from bad coverage. So it, too, needs to cultivate relationships within the community.

This is not about throwing stories out there in the hopes that they’ll be well-received. It’s about finding out what worries and concerns the public has, carefully reviewing 911 calls and detectives’ work and crime statistics, knowing what information the public needs to know down to the finest detail you can release.

It’s about building confidence in your own work as a law enforcement agency and then communicating that confidence to others, not in terms of what you know you’re doing, but in terms that allay fears and solve problems.

This is how a law enforcement agency earns trust, and from there, inspires the public to want to collaborate in crime prevention. That means media-friendliness, whether traditional or social, is a force multiplier.

What steps can you take to improve relationships with media and public in your community?

Christa M. Miller is founder and co-author of Cops 2.0. A freelance trade journalist turned content creator and public relations strategist, 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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This is a bit of a follow up to a post I did last week about the type of citizens you can expect to connect to if your department is on Twitter. Well, this week, Mashable released a Facebook infographic along roughly the same lines (pictured at right).

One of the things I found interesting was that African Americans, Asians, and Latinos are more likely to use Facebook than Caucasians. And this follows on the heels of a Morpace Omnibus study that found,

Non-Caucasian consumers tend to be more active users of Facebook, and will more likely join retailer fan pages. One-half (50 percent) of Hispanics, 46 percent of Asians, and 44 percent of African Americans consider Facebook to be a useful tool for researching new products. Only 31 percent of Caucasians agreed.

Although the study found that non-Caucasians were more likely to “fan” retailers’ pages, I think the same probably holds true for law enforcement pages. My reason being that people who “fan” retail pages are more likely to fan other organizations like charities and government agencies.

Lastly, Take a look at the top 10 Facebook cities at the bottom of the graphic. If your department is in or around one of these cities, it might be time to amp up your Facebook presence. Just a thought.

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The Bureau of Justice Assistance recently released a report titled “Lessons from the Battle Over D.A.R.E. -  The Complicated Relationship Between Research and Practice.” Unlike many other programs that attempt to reduce criminal activity, DARE has been the subject of over 30 research evaluations, the overwhelming majority of them concluding that DARE’s ability to reduce substance use amongst youth is negligible. What is even more concerning is that several studies have found an actual increase, albeit a small one, in substance abuse amongst participants.

Attempts to explain the continued funding of DARE have often focused on the tremendous support it receives from the law enforcement community. When a law enforcement official tells the community that the DARE program is worth implementing, the community often accepts the officer’s assessment at face value. Who wouldn’t?

Other explanations have suggested that perhaps those officials in charge of deciding to implement DARE are simply unaware of the research. While logical, this conclusion is also incorrect. In fact, researchers discovered that policymakers were often very aware of DARE’s inability to reduce substance use amongst youth; however, these same decision makers were aware of the other positive results that arise as a result of participation in the DARE program. So why do communities continue to fund the DARE program? Because despite its negligible effect on substance use, DARE does other things well.

What Does DARE Do Well?

One of the most important, and oft overlooked, outcomes of DARE is its ability to build positive relationships between the community and law enforcement. Youth that participate in the program frequently report improved attitudes about their local police officers, and DARE officers report that their participation in the program helped “improve their understanding of young people because they had a chance to interact with them personally.” While it may be easy to overlook this result—because it isn’t related to the stated purpose of the DARE program—in reality this outcome simply cannot be overvalued, if for no other reason than the long term benefits it provides.

Building trust between law enforcement and the communities they police is no easy task; yet, it is key to keeping the community safe.  How often are law enforcement officers unable to take a dangerous criminal off the street because the very community members that witnessed the crime are too scared to come forward? Their inability to trust that the police can keep them safe in turn keeps them unsafe by keeping dangerous offenders in their midst. Police officers face an uphill battle in developing trust with their community. Gone are the days when officers could build relationships by simply walking their beat. And yet, DARE seems to have accidentally discovered a way to build that trust.

Capitalizing on DARE’s strengths

It’s important to keep in mind that just because DARE has not been successful in its primary goal of substance use reduction, does not mean that the program is worthless. The attention and research that has been focused on DARE should be focused on more programs so that academics and criminal justice professionals can work together to discern which aspects of programs work and which do not. Where DARE has really failed is in its sluggish response to criticisms. Once we know what isn’t working we need to begin retooling our programs. While DARE did eventually embrace such change, it should have done so sooner.

It’s important to remember that DARE was an innovative approach; Glenn Levant and Chief Gates had an innovative idea. Their decision to take a chance on an innovative approach has given the criminal justice community invaluable information on what works and what doesn’t work. The challenge now is to take those lessons and learn from them.

Where Do We Go from Here?

Research has shown that when DARE officers move away from the didactic approach to drug education and instead find ways to engage youth in conversations about the various effects of mind altering substances the youth are more responsive. Perhaps drug and alcohol education is best approached from a perspective of healthy decision making.

School systems should be focusing on taking the valuable lessons of DARE and incorporating them into health courses that begin when students are in elementary school and continue throughout high school, incorporating various community partners, like DARE Officers, while at the same time broadening their approach to include information about dating violence, sexual assault, the age of consent, “sexting” and other healthy decisions.

By involving police officers, as well as other community leaders, students could be easily connected to community resources and be continually exposed to “booster shots” of information instead of programs that take place for a short period of time, only to be forgotten soon after. Their continued contact with police officers would allow law enforcement to build trusting relationships with the community and continue them throughout the youths’ school involvement, which after all is the real value of DARE

Meridith Spencer is an adjunct Professor of Criminal Justice and Sociology at Bridgewater State College and Fisher College and an advocate for public policy that is “smart on crime.” She can be reached at meras28@gmail.com or followed at www.twitter.com/meras28 .

Apparently Carbon Motors has been around for a little while now, trying to sell their tactical E7 police cruisers to law enforcement agencies across the country—especially since Ford announced they are stopping production on the Crown Vic, labeled “America’s Police Car.” Now Carbon Motors has struck a partnership with BMW to provide diesel engines for the E7. The new engines purport to cut CO2 emissions by 40%, go from 0 to 60 in 6.5 seconds, and get about 30 miles to the gallon.

Some officers have objected to car’s aesthetics, with it’s carbon fiber body and odd-looking front-end. But the cars is also one of the only cars ever to be built specifically for law enforcement use, with built in (not mounted) lights, “suicide” doors, and other features. (See more pictures after the jump.)

What’s your opinion of the E7?

James Gunter is the editor of The Crime Map and the director of social media for CrimeReports.com.

Get on the National Crime Map at CrimeReports.com