How can blogging help your agency?

How can a blog help your agency? In this day and age, sharing information, nearly instantaneously, has become easy and almost expected. A blog gives police departments the opportunity to accomplish two things: Share information and educate themselves (or officers).
My local newspaper still publishes the police "blotter" once a week. In a time when we tap our foot waiting for a microwave to finishing cooking our meals in thirty seconds, a week is an eternity! Citizens expect that police departments are going to share information with them in a timely fashion. Creating a police blog for your agency can reduce the amount of false reporting by witnesses and create a relationship with the public (Dees, 2009). Social media including twitter, facebook and blogs can give the community an opportunity to see what the police department is doing and it gives them a chance to participate in reducing crime. As with any blog, the information needs to be updated regularly and have interesting pieces. The newspaper will only write about large stories, but the local citizens want to know why the police were at a neighbors house. They want to know if any DWI arrests had been made. To the public, that is interesting news. The blogs and tweets can alert the public to dangerous situations or people. You can ask for help in identifying suspects. Help the public reduce crime by informing them of recent car breaks in a certain area. That type of news in not likely to on national broadcast, but still meaningful to the people in your community. One must eliminate the notion that the public is the enemy and information can't be shared with them Dees, 2009).

A second area where blogs can help your agency is in the area of training and information sharing between agencies and colleagues. This particular blog would not be the same blog your department created for for the public to view, but one set up in a specific training area. Bloggers, in general, will visit other blogs looking for information that is of interest to them. Setting up a training blog on fingerprinting, for example, will gather the attention from others interested in fingerprinting. The benefit is that you are now able to seek and share knowledge with officers from across the globe. Traditionally, as with college education, police officers would "go" to a class or school and learn a specific skill. As education changes from traditional to online, so must police education. Online learning and training on the computer is becoming more common. A person in another state may have a solution to a question that officers from around the country are asking. Or a member of your department could have the answer to someone's question that is being asked a thousand miles away. Previously, those questions may have gone unanswered. Unlike in a classroom setting, a blog allows for all the students to participate (Shaing-Kwei, & Hui-Yin, 2008, Blankenship, 2010. In a classroom setting, the instructor is the main focus, but he audience may have great ideas and insight as well. A blog is a great place to share those ideas.

Sharing information with the public and each other is vital. A blog and other social media gives us a unique opportunity to do just that.

References

Blankenship, M. (2011). How Social Media Can and Should Impact Higher Education. Education Digest, 76(7), 39-42.

Dees, T. (2009). Social networks for better policing: Facebook, twitter, blogs and google voice. Law & Order, 57(11), 32-36. Retrieved from http://0-search.proquest.com.lib.rivier.edu/docview/1111699480?accountid=3782

Shiang-Kwei, W., & Hui-Yin, H. (2008). Reflections on Using Blogs to Expand In-class Discussion. Techtrends: Linking Research & Practice To Improve Learning, 52(3), 81-85. doi:10.1007/s11528-008-0160-y