My commenters on the last post got me thinking: police departments (and other professions) demand officers hold themselves to a “higher standard” of conduct. So what’s that standard? What does it mean? How are officers expected to know where the lines are? The “higher standard” is subjective These are not easy questions to answer....
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Thinking about the Bozeman officer who resigned over his Facebook status updates made me think: What, exactly, do we civilians expect from our police officers? Because I’ve heard comments along the same lines from dozens of other cops. Civilians, too. Take this one from one of my own Facebook friends: “….I suffer fools not...
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When Mike Vallez launched his social media blog a few weeks ago, I was struck by a comment he made in one of his first posts: “I would venture to guess that in the future you will have a social media police officer or many social media police officers that will be involved in...
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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...
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In response to my question, “Do you think more LE don’t get on board w/ social media b/c they fear the inability to size ppl up as they would in person?” I got another response besides those from the previous entry: @cmouser: There are folks telling officers it not safe for them to do...
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Writing a blog entry, I began to speculate about why cops aren’t as involved with social media as, well, I think they should be. Was it the technology? The personal interaction? The anonymity? Or simply that they don’t yet understand it well enough? I didn’t have the experience to say authoritatively. So I opened...
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