@multizone blog | Jim Smith - @jimsmithobe - Social Media and Community Safety
This is Jim's Blog, and it draws upon his unique insights having held senior technical management and Board positions in the private sector, as well as elected Councillor positions in the London Borough of Merton and Surrey County Council where he was Cabinet Member for transport and community safety. Jim also chaired Surrey Police Authority from 2006-2008, and was a Member of the Council of the Association of Police Authorities as well as a Member of the Police National Pay Board. Jim is Strategy Advisor to Multizone.
Mid Year Update on Police and Community use of Social Media
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.
Police and Community Social Media State of the Nation
On 27th January The Guardian reported that the President of the Association of Chief Police Officers of England, Wales and Northern Ireland (ACPO), Sir Hugh Orde warned campaigners that :
"Police could use more extreme tactics on protestors."
In previous Blogs, I have used Multizone’s collected experiences over the last year or more, in their dealings with Police Forces and other policing related agencies to consider aspects of the use of Social Media in their work. It is continuing to be evident that the level of uptake, or even interest in, Social Media, is very variable between police forces across the country. This is in spite of the evangelical work of the National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) and the slowly growing number, (currently 270+), of officers who are now signed up to tweet on Nick Keane’s ‘register’ on Twitter.
Whilst the interest appears to be from a wide variety of members of serving officers,from PCSO’S right up the line to members of ACPO, the geographical variation between forces is large and appears to reflect the varying priorities and attitudes of the local force leadership. Multizone has moved on more recently to consider the leadership attitudes to Social Media from other policing agencies at five levels :
Real Time Media and its effect on the Releasing and Leaking of Data
Jim is away this week so we asked Cameron to write an article for the blog:
"Both sides of the atlantic have responded with the strongest sense of secrecy and criticism of those who made the leaks but if they were ashamed of what took place they should not have done it in the first place."
That is how Max Mosely characterised the Wiki Leaks issue On @BBCthisweek on 28 November
In recent times political and corporate spin doctors would control the issue of information in order to keep competitive advantage. Conventional wisdom stated that information should be released at the last possible moment before it would be released by another source.
"The world is changing", Mosley noted in the interview.
In 2010 with Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and WikiLeaks control is an increasingly outmoded strategy. It seems that release of information early, and often, and in real time, might be a strategy more in tune with our 24x7 information society.
Our 100 #polcasm tweets
All the @multizone tweets related to Policing 2.0 yesterday at NPIA (The National Police Improvement Agency) are recorded below. The links are all clickable. We would be delighted to continue the conversation about how to best utilise social netowkrs for policing in the 21st century on twitter, online here, or in person. Get in touch with us.
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Said thank you to @nickkeane and @accatwmpolice for engaging the private sector in #polcasm and particularly @ Multizone
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The rest of the 100 are below: -
gmp24 - The Greater Manchester Police Twitter Experiment
There are two ways of responding to the GM24 event on the 14’th/15’th October 2010.
Either one can recognise the tremendous potential impact of the event itself or one can simply criticise and bemoan the missed opportunities to deploy and take full advantage of technology which already exists today. It would be a sad day if the balance of opinion was the former.
Multizone are well aware that although the software capabilities used in the GM event have been around for well over eighteen months or so, it should not be forgotten how much institutional resistance (or apathy) which has existed until recently towards Twitter and Facebook usage in Public Services.
There have been champions for promoting their use for social networking in policing (e.g.ACC Gordon Scobbie as lead for APCO, Nick Keane at NPIA) as well as several officers from Nick’s burgeoning army of 200+ twitterers who have promoted local initiatives such as Streetwatch.
However we believe that It has taken real courage for CC Fahy to press ahead with this demonstration despite risks that it could have backfired. We should recognise that and salute it. Perhaps the best way to do so is for the Social networking Community, with an interest in Community Safety to respond by taking full advantage of the opportunities which hopefully will now emerge following #GMP24.
These opportunities, in the short term, would be to more fully use existing software features, with recently developed features of Twitter/Facebook,to bring out the full power of this new phenomenon, which is evolving in parallel with Cloud Computing technologies.
Multizone will not join those who criticise and bemoan the GMP24 initiative because of the risks incurred and the additional opportunities that were missed.
Instead, Angus Fox and his colleagues, including some members of the DEVNEST community, are already seeking to promote improvements to the use of these Apps in conjunction with the use of Twitter. This could enhance the efforts of those members of Police Forces who are seeking to make progress in their use of technology to improve their social netwworking without increasing cost.
Particular features in these improvements relate to;
- Automating the processes to minimise manual inputs.
- Means of measuring performance in terms of added value arising from Tweeting.
- Improving effectiveness of delivery.
- Visualisation of the data sets created.
In some cases ,they are available here and now. Have a look at the page about visualisation of #gmp24 data for details
Conclusion
The constructive response to the GM24 Event should not be to discuss it in terms of the Half /full-half/empty metaphor but more in terms of how to fill up the cup quickly,and at the same time,improve the taste of the tea. Well done GM Police
How are you going to be brave moving into the new social media world?
Opportunities in neighbourhood policing
Here we go - Digital Engagement at #polcasm no taxpayer money used to put this event on - sponsor organisations (like us) are making it somultizone
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ACC Scobbie started to talk about Innovation and value for money, but there was much more to it than that. He was making a call to action abundantly aimed at the mostly senior polcing audience and reinforced it by showing his own journey
Because @ACCatWMPolice had to get someone to show him how to use an iPhone hes ideal for representing the interests of technology adoption!multizone
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He alluded to the Opportunity to use technology to support neighbourhood policing (which is something that we at Multizone have total agreement with).
On #gmp24
There is no doubt that there are many opportunities arising from #gmp24. It was, he said, a Fantastic piece of work last week with the #gmp24 999 calls experiment
The question he raised was 'What are the other opportunities to build upon that and exploit the technologies further?'
The challenge he set for consultants and vendors and senior officers was 'How to make it different enough to capture the imagination again?'
He said that perhaps we should be thinking about exposing the things that are hidden from the public, that the public take for granted. How can we start to use the technology to help the public get involved by sharing that with the public.
Technology Vendors
ACPO is taking a strategic initiative in working with technology vendors to get input on what is coming. Multizone advises an element of cautious sceptisicm. They will see opportunities for grand large expensive projects. This is not a criticism, it is just in their nature.
Be Brave
ACC Scobbie really did ask the assembled policing professionals to be brave. It never struck me that any police officer was anything but brave. What it reveals is the scale of the journey here and how big some of the steps are!
This is the time to be brave says @ACCatWMPolice at #polcasm. No sense of irony. All Police Officers are brave! Comes with the job.multizone
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The challenge of the Big Society
Policing is seen to be (according to the home office)
- accountable to whitehall not the public
- police profesisonals are disempowered
- police not visible or available
- less resources
David Cameron said Big Society 'is about huge culture change in which people dont always turn to officials.....'
Home office see this as about decentralising power, introducing Police and crime commissioners, removal of central targets
Fostering local Involvement
- crime reporting
- voting on commisisoners
- using information to challenge services at meetings
- being active on a street patrol (like @streetwatch)
How does it all join up?
@jimsmithobe asked - How does it all join up? Wel he asked a longer question but @nickkeane summarised it nicelty!
The home office spoke about the Minister for localism who owns big society and claimed he has a mandate to force this level of change through across all agencies - for example the NHS just as much as the police. If you believe that then the only way to engage with these organisations will be at a community level using social tools. Because they will be the common toolls that members of the public are using.
What is unanswered in all this is just how quickly and with what governance it could be achieved. The disinterested majority will have to be taken account of. They require public services even if they are unable or unwilling to be self organising communities.
Technology Push, Market Pull, What next for public sector community safety
This time of year is not just the “Party” Conference season, it is also the Autumnal opportunity to attend ‘events’ pertinent to the public sector community safety area before the politicians return to their desks/council chambers after the Summer recess. It doesnt end with the end of the recess. The debates continue at The Guardian and Kable conference on Transforming Blue Light Services in November (there are a limited number of free places available now, please put 'Multizone' in the where did you hear about it part of the form). Or of course read on and comment right here or on twitter @multizone / @jimsmithobe
In the last week alone Multizone have attended 4 such events that have all been related to Real Time Social Networking in the Public sector.
Specifically the events were : -
- Driving Efficiencies in the Public sector (The Guardian / Kable)
- Public sector on line 2010 (The Guardian / Kable)
- SharePoint Saturday UK (Microsoft focused independent event)
- Oracle Technology Strategies to Maximise the Value of Applications (Oracle Corporation)
Uniquely to Multizone, because of our experience of technology and the public sector it is possible to draw some general conclusions by comparing the content of the presentations of some of the key speakers which would have been difficult to elicit from any one of them in isolation.
Community Safety and neighbourhood policing
Multizone have a particular interest in social media and a particular interest in the widening use of Twitter in the area of Community Safety in general and more specifically in policing from an oversight and accountability perspective right down to the involvement of Neighbourhood Policing Teams (NPT's) in delivering through more engagement with those whom they serve.
For the last year or so the Multizone have been deliberately immersed in both the comprehension and engagement with people in varied roles in community safety and policing. At the same time Multizone has taken a leadership role in the software development and startup entrepreneur communities involved in social media technologies.
This article explains what we have been doing, with what purpose, and what we have discovered to be the impediments in the public sector to social media and how they can be overcome to improve engagement.
HMIC - Chief Inspector - Highlights need for radical reform of Policing
Multizone are greatly heartened by Chief Inspector O'Connor's call for radical police reform in order to reduce costs whilst maintaining the standards of policing. I know at first hand that he achieved much in this respect during his period as Chief Constable in Surrey - this has been taken further by his successors through initiatives whilst doing national pilots under workforce modernisation initiative
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