Remember Bozeman? The Montana city with so much social media controversy? First, the town was called out all over the Web for demanding not only access to its employees’ social pages, but also their account passwords. Then, a Bozeman police officer resigned after public outcry over his poorly worded Facebook status update.
Bozeman police are again in the news, but not for social media. This time, the highlight is for an officer who went beyond his sworn duties to help a fellow human being—after he’d arrested him.
Mark Nichols at American Police Beat tells us that Officer Mark Ziegler arrested a man for shoplifting, who, it turned out, was stealing because he couldn’t afford to feed his family. After citing and releasing the man, writes Nichols, “Officer Ziegler made a quick stop at Wal-Mart where he picked up few frozen pizzas and delivered them to home of the man he had just arrested.”
Nichols goes on to write:
In a time when movie stars adopt humanitarian pet projects precisely to generate the kind of publicity Officer Ziegler didn’t care about, it’s nice to know that there are still some folks out there that show compassion to their fellow man simply because it’s the right thing to do.
Finding out who they are, not who they were
Ziegler isn’t unusual. Most law enforcement officers I know are “unsung heroes,” happy to help other cops and civilians—think about cops who replace stolen Christmas presents for children—but not believing they deserve any special attention for it.
And yet I can’t help thinking that far too often, we don’t find out just how special they are until we’re reading their obituaries. We grieve them as we read about their lives and look at their pictures. “What a terrible loss,” we say.
Does it have to be this way? Does it really protect our officers and their families to keep them hidden? What if, rather than box them into a set of rules about how they should and shouldn’t use social media, what they can and can’t say, we let them use their common sense about showing us their human sides?
They wouldn’t have to trumpet the good deeds which so many of them feel are a normal part of their jobs. In fact, allowing them to treat social media as an extension of those deeds—not as another channel, but as giving in and of itself—might just have an impact on crime rates.
Years ago when I first started writing for law enforcement trade magazines, I interviewed a school resource officer about the effect he had on his small community. One quote in particular stood out. He told me that he had made arrests where the juvenile offenders told him, “If I’d known it was you, I never would’ve done this.”
Personally feeding your community
Yeah, it’s anecdotal, but relationship- and community-building in the form of programs like Cease Fire are proven to reduce violence.
Jeremy Meyers, a professional with whom I connected via blogging and PR Twitter chats, recently wrote:
We get buried underneath our day-to-day strategizing, planning, brainstorming, trying to stave off unexpected results. We become afraid of surprises, so we try to plan for every contingency…. Slowly, the promise dies in a hailstorm of planning, structure and alienating language, and we end up with a social network presence nobody cares to visit, and we eat dinner alone in the dark.
It’s so important to take the time to flip it around, to think about feeding your communities, to connect and give whenever you can. It’s important for your own mental health, the well-being of your company, the popularity of your twitter account, the survival of the species on this planet.
Sanitizing officer experiences reduces the community power of social media. A 140-character tweet about an arrest for shoplifting is no different from a store patron seeing the cuffs go on as she passes by. But give the officer license to tweet, “This sucks. The guy was only trying to feed his family. Heading over there w/ pizza” and you allow the community to connect on a whole new level, perhaps even to offer to help the family themselves.
How can you allow officers to let the community get to know who they are?
Christa M. Miller is founder and co-author of Cops 2.0. A freelance trade journalist turned content creator and public relations strategist, she has specialized in public safety issues for the past eight years. She resides in Greenville, SC and can be reached at christammiller@gmail.com.
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Aloha Christa,
Fo a decade and a half I’ve been talking to students, parents, and teachers, and even the general public, that just because you don’t have a MySpace / FaceBook account, that doesn’t mean that somebody else can’t write about YOU on THEIR MySpace / FaceBook account. And their post can be either in your favor or not.
Some, if not most, law enforcement agencies are reluctant to “allow” their officers to have personal accounts on social networking sites.
Some may have policies, written or “unwritten”, that prohibit them from doing so.
BUT
Those policies do NOT apply to citizens like Mr. Nichols from doing so.
Nor does it prevent me from doing likewise. Nor does those policies apply to those of us who appreciate and value the work these men and women do day in and day out.
They may not be able to “pat” themselves on the back, but that doesn’t stop me nor should it stop you from doing so.
Mahalos & Be Safe!
BTW,
I tell my “brothers & sisters” who are still “on the job”, I’ll praise you for the great work you do, BUT I’ll also “rip” you if you ever tarnish that badge you wear.
Yeah, but Chris, how many people would’ve known about this if the reporter hadn’t been there to pick up on it? My point wasn’t that officers should be tooting their own horns — it was that social networking isn’t necessarily seen in the correct light.
Seeing it in the negative context of “taking” — an exercise in narcissism or whatever you want to call it — is what gets officers and their agencies in trouble. Put it in the positive context of “giving,” and an officer isn’t venting frustration with people… but instead, frustration with being only one limited human being.
That burns cops out fast. You and I both know it. Agencies need to recognize this and also recognize that social networking can provide a really valuable outlet, when used reasonably and appropriately. Within those boundaries, is the foundation for helping civilians understand police work, and not only understand but start to help mitigate some of those limitations.
Good lord, I’m an idealist…
Mahalos for the clarification, Christa!
And yes, I’ve “been there, done that”, And yes, I have to admit there were time I’ve felt “burnt out”. Luckily, I was able to climb out of the “funk” and get “re-vitalized”. However, at the time, social media was not yet “created” .
As for being an “idealist”, the ancient Hawaiian voyagers were guided by the stars as they crossed the Pacific. Idealists are like those stars as we navigate though life.
Chris, thanks for the kind words.
You’re one of the lucky ones — able to pull yourself out of a funk without relying on booze or painkillers or any other self-destruction that way too many other cops have. That’s a trend that social may not be able to help 100% (could even lead to more isolation if there is too much noise to signal ratio), but taken together with other communication strategies — citizens’ academies, ridealongs, transparent PR, etc. — could continue to allow everyone to understand (and sympathize with) one another that much better.