Micro-community policing taps social media

Lauri Stevens tells a well-worn joke among her fellow social media advocates in the law enforcement community: that decision-makers are less afraid to give police officers guns and Tasers than to let them on Twitter.

It’s slight hyperbole, but it’s also true. There’s a general concern that the men and women in blue can do more damage on social media than in the line of fire.

“There’s still a lot of resistance to having line officers use these tools,” said Stevens, a social media strategist for law enforcement.

The Seattle Police Department (SPD) is a bit of an outlier in that regard, among the more advanced social media communicators in the country. The department added to its online arsenal in October by partnering with Nextdoor.com, a private social network for neighborhoods that is being used to roll out the department’s new micro-community policing plans that establish problem-solving strategies for specific neighborhoods.

“We are trying to create a way for [police] to reach out and impact the community in a way they didn’t have before,” said SPD spokesperson Det. Drew Fowler.

Micro-policing

Within days of taking office, SPD Chief Kathleen O’Toole ordered micro-community policing plans be drafted by each of the five precinct commanders, who were tasked with engaging residents and business owners about the crime issues that most concerned them.

The city is divided into 53 communities — plus Seattle Public Schools and the East African community — each with its own policing focal points. Fowler said the plans are a “living document” that will be altered with the public’s wants and needs. He said the micro-neighborhood concept is an homage to Seattle’s history of having a rich neighborhood-centric culture, with each having its own identity.

Although primary response will be to 911 emergency calls, the micro policing effort will focus on proactive response to patrolling concerns for each community. West Precinct Operations Lt. Marc Garthgreen said the hope is to target particular needs of areas rather than generalize.

“It’s more compartmentalized,” Garthgreen said. “Break it down to more manageable pieces so we can say, ‘This is what’s effecting this area.’”

Neighbors, police connect

A 2010 Pew Research Center study found that 29 percent of Americans knew only a few of their neighbors and 28 percent knew none of their neighbors by name. The Nextdoor app offers a virtual sense of community, with features that range from providing alerts for a lost dog to organizing a block party. Approximately 16 percent of the Nextdoor conversations are related to crime and safety, according to Nextdoor stats.

There are 827 agencies across the country using the Nextdoor platform, with more than 500 being law enforcement. Jeremie Beebe, director of partnership with Nextdoor, said all but two of Seattle 197 neighborhoods are using Nextdoor. Nextdoor requires verification of a home address before anyone can join a specific neighborhood group.

The San Francisco-based company doesn’t release private membership numbers within neighborhoods, but there are at least 10 verified Nextdoor users in neighborhoods including Queen Anne, Magnolia, Capitol Hill, First Hill, Madison Valley, Madison Park, Madrona, Leschi and Ballard.

Reg Newbeck, voluntary lead for Madison Park Nextdoor, said there are 734 users in Madison Park and that his posts reach more than 3,800 people. One of the best outlets for the program so far, he said, has been as an open forum for discussion on different Metro route proposals.

SPD uses a different product than the neighborhood residents, meaning it can only post messages and respond to individual posts related to those messages. It is not able to monitor or view the day-to-day content of the neighborhood members. The SPD platform is all public information that can be seen at nextdoor.com/seattlepd. Thus far, the officer’s first posts have been introductory greetings.

Beebe said Nextdoor’s major advantage is that police can tailor the messages at the specific neighborhood levels, unlike with Twitter or other more broad-based networks.

“The types of messaging they’re able to do is much more specific and location-relevant,” Beebe said.

Beebe said the SPD is the first agency Nextdoor has worked with to use its existing boundaries in conjunction with drawing its own neighborhood boundaries.

“They literally took our neighborhood boundaries established by neighbors and drew those to include and not separate those neighborhoods,” he said.

Individual officers directly involved in the community will have most access and accessibility through the Nextdoor system. The officers underwent a day of training to acclimate themselves to the system. Fowler expects there to be a transition for growing comfort.

“Whether they give us a new gun or a new social media tool, there will be a period of acclimatization,” he said.

Police on social media

A 2013 survey from the International Association of Chiefs of Police found that 96 percent of police departments use social media in some capacity. But it doesn’t mean all of them are using it to its fullest extent.

“We have 18,000 police departments in the country,” said Stevens, whose most recent SMILE conference for law enforcement took place in late April in Phoenix. “The percentage of them that really understand the depth you can achieve with social media is a really small percentage.”

SPD has nearly 115,000 Twitter followers and about 1.5 million page views of its SPD Blotter each year. The department also has a blog, a Facebook account and a minor presence on Tumblr and Reddit. Twitter information ranges from immediate updates on movement by the May Day protestors to jokes about arrests on the Blotter.

Stevens said SPD is one of the best in the country at connecting with the community through social media and is “blazing some new trails” in the way Freedom of Information Act requests are handled by putting dash-cam videos on YouTube under “SPD BodyWornVideo.”

Fowler said SPD is “experimenting” with the dash-cam posts, attempting to find a more elegant solution to public disclosure requests, while balancing the Washington Privacy and Washington Disclosure acts. He said the department is currently releasing random dash-cam samples, building up to a larger-scale release of videos even before they’re requested.

SPD is also in the midst of a body camera pilot program and hopes to get ahead of the likely potential issues related to privacy and data storage, seeing as SPD has more than 300,000 hours of video from in-car cameras alone.

“Actually putting the camera on the officer is the easy part,” Fowler said.

Stevens doesn’t believe it’s necessary for law enforcement to be on every social media platform, though she calls Facebook and Twitter “musts.” She encourages departments to find out where their audience is and meet them there.

“As a whole, I think there’s a long way to go, but I will say the ones who are using it and have a policy and are not trying to make it go away are doing well in some form or fashion,” she said. “Those that haven’t started yet or don’t have a policy are probably feeling beat-up when they go to work,” she said.

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