Social media and community interaction

As a leader in a Law Enforcement organization it is not only important to provide direction, mentoring and coaching to your officers, but it is also important to engage and interact with our communities.  Today this engagement should include social media.

Last week I was asked to attend two community events, one was in support of gay pride and the other was a Juneteenth celebration.   For the gay pride event I was asked to partner with a local non-profit community center that serves the LGBT community; they requested that I join them in their both and answer community questions or concerns of a law enforcement nature.  For Juneteenth I was contacted by a local business district and asked to spend some time interacting with the community at their event.  I was happy to attend both, I see events like these as opportunities to engage members of my community in ways that allow them to see me as a person who happens to be a police officer, rather than the other way around.  Events like this help to bridge the gap between law enforcement and the communities we serve.  I often hear about community concerns through these interactions, concerns that I probably wouldn’t hear in any other way.

Both events are examples of traditional community outreach performed by officers in our profession every day.  While these activities are a necessary in today's high speed world they are only part of what is it means to engage the community.  With the advent of social media, our communities want and expect more.  The expectation is that our agencies will have a presence on facebook, twitter and any number of other social media.  Agencies must have this presence to fully connect with their communities.   This often requires the dedication of additional resources and funding to maintain that presence.

My agency for example has a full time civilian employee as part of our public information office who monitors and updates our social media channels.  I know a number of you are thinking this is a waste of money, but to not have such dedication would be irresponsible, especially in these difficult times.  At a national level, law enforcement as a profession, has been under fire, social media allows us to interact directly with our communities.  This helps to build public trust, and ensures that our side of any news story is communicated directly to the public without the possible interference of a third party editor.  We are also able to share the good stories of what our officers do on a daily basis, the type of stories that main stream media will typically ignore.  My agency currently has 29 thousand followers on facebook and over 55 thousand followers on twitter, we can reach out to all of those followers and speak directly to them and they to us.  This is something that could not have been done on such a large scale in the past.  I see it as a very good thing, how about you?