A Washington Post headline this week caught my eye: “Police want to stay out of Occupy story.” As quoted in the article: “What keeps police chiefs up at night is that somehow the purpose of the movement will become about actions that the police have taken,” said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive…
Category Archives: Community relations
Creating partners in public safety
A couple of articles caught my eye last week. First, there was Good Old Bill’s wistful story of a spontaneous decision to engage in some community policing: People see that little of us these days, other than in a quick fleeting visit or by passing them whilst preoccupied whilst on foot – or more likely…
An exercise in social
Monday last week was something of a first for me. Instead of writing about public relations and social media, I talked about it – to a roomful of about 160 public information officers, media relations officers, command staff and others involved with police information dissemination. The venue: the 2-day Advanced Strategic Communications Seminar, “Social Media…
How free Web tools save one small-town agency from new Nixle fees
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…
Workers vs. widgets: policing in the age of high tech
Last month, Federal News Radio reported that budget cuts to the Defense Department meant choosing between high-tech firepower, and the troops who would become “irrelevant” during a war that implemented it. Could high tech make police irrelevant? The Memphis Daily News’ article about information and intelligence sharing among Tennessee law enforcement officers shows the ways…
Political pressure? Refer to your values
It’s been said that social media “amplifies” whatever an organization’s values are. If a company is all about pushy sales, so will be its social efforts. If it seeks long-term customer loyalty based on relationships, its social efforts will reflect that too. Likewise among police departments. An agency that respects its citizens enough to communicate…