@multizone blog | Jim Smith - @jimsmithobe - Social Media and Community Safety

At the beginning of this year, Multizone reviewed the way that Police Forces in the UK in general were progressing with their use of social networking tools especially with regard to the rapidly increasing use of mobile phones.

From the point of view of a supplier of such tools and ‘know how’, it was concluded that progress was very variable between individual forces, and there was not a concensus between Chief Officers about how to make progress.

It may be helpful to review the progress made during the last six months. Especially since there are a whole set of knee-jerk reactions to the use of social media in policing after the civil disorder in the past week or so. We have been working in this exact area for over two and a half years, and here is our assessment of the state of now :-

Political leadership – The Home Secretary and Policing Minister are continuing to give encouragement, in general terms only. The Cabinet Office are aware of the overall position regarding exploding public usage of mobile phones, and of the evolving technology which could significantly contribute to improving the cost effectiveness in public service positions. The Home Office are contributing to the formulation of policing, at the same time as they are encouraging and supporting police forces to explore new ways of addressing a wide variety of policing activities through their ‘Trailblazer” projects. These projects are, largely web-based, and are using social networks, primarily as a unidirectional means of communicating with their communities. One project, our one in Surrey, has deliberately started from a ‘mobile phone’ based platform. This has now demonstrated that this approach is relevant to the role of neighbourhood or community police officers, peso's and staff and is now available as a two-way communication app from the Apple App Store. It also has the potential to cope with the ambitions of all the other trail-blazer projects and contains elements of all of them.

HMIC have shown only very limited interest, to date, in this newly evolving use of technology, and have sought to follow the work being undertaken by ACPO. However it is not clear to those in the outside world how ACPO are themselves developing policing through their working taskgroups, of which there appear to be at least three – Local policing, Protest Policing, and the one which for obvious reasons, is not talked about, namely covert policing/counter terrorism. It is not clear whether these initiatives are related in any way, or whether they are being persued separately, with little lateral communication between them. If they do not do so, this will result in a piecemeal tactical approach, rather than a comprehensive strategic set of policy guidelines.

This is echoed in several of the larger forces, who because of their size and complexity, together with other pressures, such as the Olympic Games, have no overall strategy for the use of new approaches to social networking in support of their day-to-day operations. Indeed, it is also worrying that to the outside eye, many forces have not yet concluded that they actually need one!

NPIA are continuing to promote and encourage increasing use of open networks and during the last six months, the number of ‘Tweeting’ police officers has more than doubled (ref: Nick Keane's excellent Twitter List of policing officers). It does appear, that this gathering group are drawn from all ranks, from PCSO’s up to Chief Constables, and Twitter/Facebook are no longer looked upon with distaste by officialdom in the forces. One general point of agreement which came out of NPIA’s Policing 2.0 meeting, was the need for App’s to be developed which explicitly address the needs of policing.

Individual Police Forces – The feasibility of a ‘mobile phone’ approach using a carefully designed platform, has now been satisfactorily demonstrated at Surrey Police.

We are delighted with the clearly measurable 'culture shift' we have observed in the use of social media as a routine and ongoing part of the work of neighbourhood teams in Surrey and the clear benefits gained in the community support of local policing.

However, now that the app we developed for them has been published on the App Store, a number of issues can now be expected to arise as we talk to other forces:

• Inhibitions to progress are still to be seen whether they manifest themselves as ‘turf battles’ between Marketing Comms, IT and Operational policing, or in tensions between ‘central services’ and local operations. Experience shows that success will only be possible, if corporate leadership in individual forces is strong enough.
• Will policing follow its traditional approach, by developing bespoke Apps, tailored to each force, which will inevitably result once again, in massive unnecessary duplication and associated expenditure? Let us hope that common sense will prevail, by having an optimium number of Apps platforms which provide sufficient competition between providers, without unnecessary waste of precious national resources.
• With the growth in numbers of individual users of Twiter/Facebook, or by local teams of NPT’s collectively, there is growing evidence, that many of them, regard unidirectional communication is a sufficient end in itself. Hopefully there will be enough strategic thinkers making their views known to HMIC, ACPO,HO,….. to disabuse those of this persuasion.