In a relatively short period of time, social media has made its way into every part of our lives. Not only has it become a core requirement for police to communicate information, it has changed public expectation regarding transparency, timeliness and dialogue around police activity.
This new form of connectedness is helping to close the gap between the public and the police; a citizen can contact us through a variety of avenues, all with the understanding that their voice will be heard, their concerns dealt with or, on some occasions, their compliments of our work published in the public domain. At the beginning, there were fears in policing around social media; namely our inability to control it. A lot of questions were asked of our DPD media section: How will we manage a crisis? Will it harm investigative integrity? How do we keep up?
Luckily, our fears were very different from the reality of this new phenomenon. In fact, I look back and wonder how we ever worked without these tools, recognizing now that they are an irreplaceable asset in our attempts to build and maintain public trust.
We now have the capacity to push out real-time, factual information. When there is a traffic event causing gridlock in a certain section of the city, we communicate with pictures, constant updates and options for alternative routes until such time as traffic is flowing freely.
If there is a serious criminal event, we may use social media to help reduce fear and keep rumours at bay. We also use it as a recruiting tool and to keep the public informed of our day-to-day activities.
One of our big fears was whether we would be the victims of social media "lynch-mob." The reality is that, on the whole, the public is very supportive of the work of police and social media communities exist mostly to help, rather than hinder the role of police.
We have been criticized through these channels but we deal with it. Often we will communicate directly with someone who has contacted us with concerns and more often than not, we can solve the problem together.
Interestingly, social media has also helped us with our relationship with traditional media outlets.
We share information through a variety of channels, allowing journalists to gather the information they need to do their job.
As an example, we recently had a rolled tractor-trailer unit on Highway 17. We tweeted images of the accident to give the public an idea of what we were dealing with. On this particular day, it was righting a flipped semi.
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New way of communicating