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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In the last few weeks I’ve explored why more law enforcement officers and agencies are not jumping on board the social media bandwagon; the dangers of official or unofficial officer use; and the importance of a good social media policy, whether or not your agency is officially using social media. What now? Social media...
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An interesting debate has cropped up over on ConnectedCops.net about whether police officers should be allowed to blog anonymously. It started with Lauri’s point in her post on elements of a social media policy (cross posted here and on her blog): 3. Identity. Some bloggers work anonymously, using pseudonyms or false screen names. Law...
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A few months ago one of our Twitter law enforcement contacts, a community relations officer, tweeted that she was thinking about starting a blog for her agency. Scott replied: Portsmouth PD had tried it, but the number of negative comments forced the agency to shut it down. They couldn’t block the negative comments or...
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I’ve had in mind for awhile to write about social media policies, but held off because, well, I didn’t know a lot about them. So when I connected with Lauri Stevens (@lawscomm on Twitter) and found she had written a policy for the Bellevue (Nebraska) Police Department, I knew 1) I wanted her to...
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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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