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.

Angus Fox has been leading the development of one particular group known as 'Devnest' which is shorthand for the London Twitter Developer meetup. He leads and co-ordinates their monthly meetings, with leading industry guest speakers. Attendees include representatives from Twitter Corporation themselves, and from Yahoo, Paypal, Google, and many others, as well as uniquely providing a platform for talented developers to show their often ground breaking achievements and ideas. Devnest has under his stewardship recieved sponsorship in addition to that which Multizone provides from The Guardian Open Platform in London and from Paypal Developer Network. Devnest is now a firm fixture in the London social media development community.

James Smith OBE, fresh from the cares and burdens of elected office, as portfolio holder for Community Safety and chairmanship of Surrey Police Authority has led Multizone's activities regarding community safety and policing in order to better determine specific requirements and importantly to understand the constraints and potential objections to the new social media technologies in these generic types of organisation.

Looking Back at 2010 - obstacles in the way of adoption of social media in community safety and policing

Looking back over this period, Multizone has clearly identified several obstacles to the development of Twitter related new tools for community safety and policing.  These obstacles have had an impact by slowing down and in some cases blocking the adoption of social media as a mechanism for two way engagement in community safety except in a few localised areas in England.

The obstacles have included :

1. Cultural impediments in many organisations in the public sector including policing, at all levels to the very idea of 'Tweeting' (or using social networks such as Facebook to provide information and updates).
2. A total lack of understanding of the context in which we all find ourselves today in Britain in 2010 with the use of these networks in all areas of our society, both technically and socially.
3. Other issues, with higher priorities, financial and political, which have crowded out serious consideration of this new phenomenon. The change in government has not helped because of a period of 'stasis' after the General Election due to uncertainties over policy changes.

Progress in 2010 - green shoots of acceptance of social media

It does not seem that these issues are peculiarly British as similar problems can be seen in North America, even though there tends to be better acceptance of technological change in that region. However, during the last year there has been some progress in overcoming these obstacles in this country, albeit somewhat more slowly than on the other side of the Atlantic.

The cultural barrier is diminishing as more Police Officers (and more recently, Police Authorities) are becoming actively interested in Twitter. Much of this has arisen in a few forces where there has been strong leadership at Chief Officer level with active support from Nick Keane at the National Police Improvement Agency (NPIA). He has now received formal contact from almost 200 Police Twitterers (probably many more by now) around the country and he adds them to his Twitter List as a mechanism for recognition of these pioneers. This should be compared with an order of magnitude more in North America.

The cultural barrier is also being rapidly eroded by the rapidly growing number of applications of Social Networks to local policing, particularly where they have shown themselves to be useful in high profile incidents such as the G20 protests and the Whitehaven and Moat incidents where pictures were being aggregated from cell phones in almost real time on social media sites such as Flickr and where a running live commentary was being made and followed worldwide using hashtags specific to the unfolding events. The fact that these things were significant was amplified by the traditional news media showing pictures and quotes from twitter and these other networks. The social networks were not the news - the information on them was in some cases more current than conventional information sources as demonstrated by News TV channels showing twitter and flickr pages and commenting on them.

Despite the progress there is a lack of genuine engagement

However in spite of this progress it has to be recognised that most of the applications and uses of social networking (twitter or the many alternatives) are limited by the extent of the understanding by the users of how Twitter can be used, resulting in its misuse as a convenient way of communicating, usually unidirectionally, with their local communities or communities of interest. There are very few examples, as yet, of genuine two way communication and engagement using Twitter in this context.

This can be attributed to two generic causes:

1. A lack of specific applications (apps) built to meet the specific requirements of community engagement in areas of community safety and neighbouhood policing which overcome real obstacles to the use of existing tools. Two example of this are: -
   
   1. Better electronic means of openly scheduling activities of Streetwatch Participants to enable appropriate insurance cover
   2. An application which uses Taxonomy based tools to provide front line NPT members with guidance and support to get more value out of their SmartPhones and to exercise their delegated powers with lower consequential risk within a delegated command structure.
2. The reluctance to take steps to invest in new social media applications and tools, perhaps due to the long timescales, complexity, and expense associated with internal IT in existing forces.

Approaches to improve engagement

There are positive approaches to the improvement of engagement. Improvement of comprehension of the environment and the capabilities in it can be addressed by training and guidance at practical and strategic levels.

The nature of the new breed of Twitter app developers is quite different to the expensive, slick, and Multizone would say often outmoded IT consultancies who have traditionally supplied systems to public bodies such as police Forces. The new generation of developers approach their task in a much more modular way with apps being written very rapidly and relatively inexpensively based upon known public frameworks and components in order to deliver benefits and return on investment almost immediately.

Multizone are not talking about writing new internal proprietary systems for community safety and policing. That would be inappropriate and wrong. What we can deliver is the augmentation of existing systems to cope with the new demands put upon them by a requirement to interact and operate with the public social networks like Twitter and Facebook.

Providing that underlying technologies and their platforms and applications programming interfaces (API's) are properly designed, new applications can be developed and iterated using a modular approach rather than a monolithic and internal IT mindset systems design approach culminating in a proprietary system of limited value due to limited internal reach.

Such applications can quickly deliver policing and community safety virtual presence, engagement and interaction on social networks, and have the benefit of being able to be quickly iterated as new demands are placed upon them.

One key issue which needs to be addressed is how to harness the often brilliant developers who are often very inexperienced, particularly in policing matters, to connect with Police Forces and related agencies. Such a connection will be necessary in order to gain the full benefits of social networks such as Twitter rather than approaching them from an outmoded mindset.

Community development - commercial professional support

This is one reason why Multizone is so active in the developer community. Devnest activities are becoming better organised, but lack a focus - it is simply a community of interest. A focus  and some funding is needed to pursue identified social media opportunities more quickly as Twitter and related developments gain momentum throughout the world and the returns on investment become apparent.

Devnest events include contributions from Twitter direct from the USA as they see the merit of supporting such groups in their own commercial interests.

Multizone have been developing connections with developers through devnest.

• At warblecamp, a full weekend devnest developer event, Multizone sponsored the creation of #twical - a simple, open source driven calendar-to-twitter web service. It allows people or applications to upload, add, mute, delete, edit and tweet calendar events. It was initially built by volunteers at warblecamp who wanted to do it just for fun. Twical has grown now from a proof of concept application to bridge the gap between existing event calendars and twitter, into a more commercial web service based application platform supported by Multizone and is a fundamental component of further community safety and policing applications. The work in progress is at www.twical.net where initial feasibility is now complete and ready for use by calendaring and twitter aware individuals.
• Multizone also brought about the creation of a Twitter enabled iPhone application in the Apple Store. The Devnest app may be simple, but it was built using state of the art frameworks to current web standards by a 17 year old student participant in the Devnest community in just a couple of weeks and because of the way it was written it was possible to make the application available on the Google Android mobile phone platform within a couple of hours of it being completed for the iPhone.

These activites are not without purpose. Angus Fox has been producing software products and managing their requirements since 1985. This new model for software production by brilliant developers harnessed by a fixed set of requirements allows Multizone to deliver outstanding well thought out capabilities with professional commercial support for their delivery, to the community safety and policing audience.

Focus

Multizone is now focusing on market development, in the community safety and policing markets in Britain today. Multizone also need to find creative ways to engage the brilliant developer community it is a part of. Lastly of course the company needs to do these things on a commercial basis.

Consequently and in the light of the rapid evolution of social media technology particular emphasis is now being given to provision of the following services : -

1. Strategic advice to Police Authorities on the strategies the may employ to augment their existing capabilities with Twitter
2. To procure where available or to supply or partner add-on modules which permit existing capabilities to be enhanced
3. The provision of initial and ongoing support and training, service and support of the modules they supply.

It is to be hoped the required understanding and support will be provided by funded projects from Police Forces and agencies including HMIC, APCO, The Home Office and the APA, and that is to where Multizone's attention is being drawn.

James E Smith OBE

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