Civility

With many famous people losing their cool in public, civility has been the flavor of the day. I have talked to a number of folks about celebrities behaving badly and the even remote parallels to other more serious events, such as the stabbing at a Coral Gables high school and a fight at a Belle Glade high school.

The Encarta dictionary defines civility as “the formal politeness that results from observing social conventions.” Convention is a fancy word for rule or principle.

It isn’t easy for humans to follow rules. I do not believe we are inherently nice. In a Twitter discussion with @lapp, he argued that people are born nice and become mean. Regardless, we know, based on our experience with two year olds, that until discipline and training kick in, our kids are prone to be self-centered and, at times, violent toward each other. Obviously, some people never get it.

So, in order to achieve civility, we ought to start with a simple rule. Let’s teach our kids to just be nice. The definition does not suggest that one would actually want to observe the “social conventions.” It’s like the shoe company says, we ought to just do it.

Consider driving in South Florida. It doesn’t take much for a simple traffic dispute to escalate into an all out brawl. On the other hand, it doesn’t take much time and effort to wave (with all fingers) someone over who wants to get into your lane. Believe me; your kids in the car with you will take note.

I am not advocating weakness or that anyone should become a victim. As officers, we are going to do what is reasonable and necessary to protect ourselves and you should do the same. At times, though, it takes real fortitude to walk or drive away from a potential conflict.

Policing, coaching sports, and watching American Idol taught me that people will not often recognize their own limitations and cannot grasp that perhaps, they are wrong. Let’s forget about who is at fault. If need be, we’ll send an officer out or someone can hire an attorney to figure out who is actually right or wrong. In an age of such great complexity, let’s follow one simple rule, just be nice.

Spin

Most of our major news is derived from our press releases or from our daily blotter, a synopsis of activity from the previous day or weekend. The releases and the blotter have been sent to various media outlets, previously by fax, but recently by e-mail.

As I mentioned in the Great Expectations piece, we continue to adapt our communication strategy to improve the flow of information and to meet customer demands. Recently, we decided to make our press releases immediately available to the public, instead of sending copies to the media and posting the releases online at a later time. We have also increased the speed at which information is released through Nixle and Twitter.

These changes caught the interest of a local television news outlet and they came to do a story on our use of social media. I think it was a great piece because it covered some of the tools we are using. However, the comments about bypassing the media “screening” process were important, because it illustrated what I believe to be a key issue surrounding the use of social media by law enforcement. Check out the article and video here http://bit.ly/25g7U.

What is interesting about the reaction was that we didn’t change the information we released. We simply changed the timing relative to when the public receives the information. In this age of transparency, I think increased public access is a good thing.

However, Mr. Brosemer has a valid point about the other elements of our communication strategy and social media elements. We are writing our own stories and creating our own news, using social media to reach a wider audience and, in some ways, creating our own spin. Why? Because we can and we should.

Because of economic conditions and the explosive growth of social media, we certainly do not enjoy the media coverage we used to get. The local outlets do not have the resources they used to have and they are not interested in many of the items we think may be useful to our customers.

I do not believe our constituents are mindless drones. They are perfectly capable of drawing their own conclusions about our stories and our spin. The beauty of our system of government coupled with the application of social media is the two-way nature of the communication. If someone doesn’t like what we are doing (social media or otherwise), I’ll hear about it. As we have demonstrated already, we are not afraid to identify shortcomings and make changes.

Mark made an important point at the end of the Channel 5 piece. We, in no way, are trying to bypass the traditional media. Our social media elements provide yet another layer and function as a resource to them as well. I think the media will play a valuable role in this debate. More is good. Let me know what you think.