DALLAS, Texas — A nightstick, a revolver, and a smartphone to check in on Foursquare.
That’s the necessary gear of the future beat cop, as envisioned at the SMILE Conference — aka Social Media, the Internet, and Law Enforcement — held over three scorching September days in downtown Dallas. The site was the incongruously trendy Aloft Hotel, where the generally beefy and buzz-cut crowd learned the ins and outs of tweeting while surrounded by tasteful splatter art, concrete-slab walls, and white leather sofa cubes.
In their Web savvy, the hundred-plus police officers and other law-enforcement pros in attendance ranged from social-media pioneers like Toronto constable Scott Mills, who checks into Foursquare and Facebook as he walks the beat, all the way down to decrepit veterans who, in the words of one attendee, “are still figuring out solar calculators.” For the latter group, early morning sessions helped to teach basics: Day 1, setting up a Twitter account; Day 2, setting up a Facebook account (with the right privacy settings); Day 3, using TweetDeck and — a last-minute addition, said the conference organizer — Google+.
Then later each day, from the podium, speakers delved into some more advanced material. Capt. Mike Parker, who runs public information for the Los Angeles Country Sheriff’s Department, explained the magic of Google Alerts (to monitor chatter about your department) and YouSendIt (to get large video files to the media). The one commonality: Almost all the recommended tech was free, since most police departments have minuscule budgets for software or services. When a rep from a social-media monitoring firm mentioned his starting price—$500 per month—a few attendees snickered audibly from the back.
So, how should the police use the Web? Here were some of the takeaways:
Manage the news media… Parker gave a helpful primer on what makes news, explaining to his pupils about the “11 C’s,” which run from “catastrophe” and “conflict” to “celebrity” and “critters” (i.e., animals). The one eyebrow-raiser in Parker’s presentation was his assurance that “Photoshop is your friend.” He showed a photo of a helicopter rescue and bragged about how his department had changed the officers’ blue pants to green, since green was the official departmental color. He also showed off the picture in this news release. “The only thing Photoshopped in is the beam of light,” he said — i.e., the image’s single most prominent feature.
… but counter misinformation. Superintendent Mark Payne, from the West Midlands Police in the UK, talked about his experiences tweeting during this past summer’s riots. His town of Wolverhampton did get hit hard by looters, but meanwhile there were rumors about violence (burning shopping malls, police shootings) that hadn’t happened at all. He was an operational commander on the streets during the violence, so his time to tweet was limited. But he felt like it was best spent in knocking down rumors, which could become self-fulfilling prophecies if left unchecked. Payne also stresses that it’s important that all police staff are kept informed about rumors, and their truth or falsity, so that they don’t unwittingly spread lies: Because they’re associated with the police, their friends and family trust their word.
In investigations, think ahead. Johann Ortega, detective at the Dallas Police Department, said to keep copies of everything important. If a suspect has posted a YouTube video that might be used as evidence against him, you should save a copy to your hard drive through a free video-downloading service. Also, you should print the YouTube page: Without that, you might not be able to definitely link the video to the suspect’s account. Ortega also stressed the importance of using different browsers for investigations, to keep separate accounts separate. Otherwise, cookies can trip you up, causing posts to be sent from the wrong account.
Virtualize your beat. When Mills, the constable in Toronto, is assigned to the city’s club district, he stops into venues and checks in on Foursquare. First, he says, that acts as a deterrent: A police officer in the list of attendees is the virtual equivalent of a uniform in a crowd. Second, if anything goes wrong, he figures that his check-in can help with the investigation. That’s because, whenever possible, he makes what might seem like a chilling move to some Foursquare users: he saves a screenshot of all the other attendees after he checks in, so that he has a ready-made list of potential witnesses in the event of a crime.
Mills and the other evangelists at SMILE were aware that those kinds of tactics make some privacy advocates squeamish. (Why track a kid, just because he checks into a club?) But to Mills, patrolling Foursquare or Twitter or public activity on Facebook is no different from walking around in a physical place.Also, as Mills points out, the trust issue cuts both ways: Cops, in order to win trust online, also have to post frequently (and informally) on social networks themselves, opening their own words and actions to scrutiny. At a Thursday-night open-bar roundtable, some SMILE attendees expressed shock that Payne’s force, in the West Midlands, allowed all police to tweet in an official capacity. No smart corporation would allow that, the dissenters pointed out. At the very least, they wouldn’tencourage it.
But Mills — an intense, well-built young officer who spent most of the conference running Google Hangouts on a laptop, so cops from all around could watch the sessions — responded to this line of argument with passion. Trained correctly, he said, officers can learn to be just as responsible in their online personae as they are offline. And once trained, these social-media cops can do enormous good.
“Late at night,” he said, “you do more good walking a beat in a cyber neighborhood than walking a beat on the street.”
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