DC Public Safety Blog

Article offered by the Community Policing Dispatch, COPS Office, US Department of Justice, January 2010.

Social media sites are popping up everywhere as more and more agencies are starting to incorporate them into their media outreach efforts. We created our federal social media site 3 years ago, and believe that the site has provided concrete benefits to our agency. At this writing, we are averaging 200,000 requests a month. Here are some of the “lessons learned” that have been derived from our collective experience:

What is Social Media?

There is no formula or specific definition for a successful social media strategy; it depends entirely on your circumstances and what you want to accomplish. The heart of the philosophy of social media is the willingness to interact with your customers to establish a dialog. It’s an even exchange; you give them neat and interesting content and they give you information to improve what you do.

Management Directives

Your managers state that they want to enter the social media world and have directed you to do it. But do what, and who will do everything necessary? Are they interested in a blog? Do they want video and audio? Are they interested in photos? Do they want a presence on Facebook and other social media sites? Who will respond to questions?

The bottom-line is that management needs to figure out what it wants and what it’s prepared to spend. They also need to know that it’s impossible for one person to do everything necessary for a successful site.

Who Creates Web sites?

Web sites are created by a variety of people with a mix of skills. Here are the skill sets necessary to create a web site:

• Web site creation (designers and coders)
• Web site population (posting relevant materials)
• Web site marketing
• Writing for web sites.

 The problem is that there are few individuals who possess all those skills. Reliance on less than well rounded talent becomes painfully evident the more we visit emerging web sites. But the sad truth is that few web specialists have all the skills necessary to build a successful site. The lesson is that dependence on one person to create and manage a web site may not work.

What Do You Want Your Web site to do?

If you want a static web site that will never or rarely change and if you’re not interested in using the site to market your agency or engage people, you have just hit the jackpot. These sites require little maintenance. However, if you want the site to promote the agency and its agenda and if you want to interact with your customers/citizens (the heart of social media) then you have entered an entirely different world.

Marketing through social media means an endless effort to create new content that serves your customer/citizen base. The idea is a continual interaction with the people you want to reach, thus a constant flow of new products. The production of video, audio, blogs or other items requires dedication and resources.

Social media means having people to create products. Writing for the web or media production for the web must be appropriate. You’re not writing for academic journals. Web creation must be friendly, engaging in content and style and approachable. You have to make it easy for people to get the information they need.

Marketing Your Site

This is the essence of many unsuccessful sites, no one knows you exist. Suggestions:

• Create a great site that users will find interesting and engaging.
• Establish your key words, the words that will attract people. What are the key words or phrases that will attract people to your site?
• The address (URL) title and description should contain your key words. This may be “the” most important factor leading to success in marketing your site.
• Your key words need to be integrated into your postings.
• Create e-mail marketing lists.
• Create Twitter marketing lists.
• Ask for links or create content that other people will feel compelled to link to. Links are like votes of confidence in the value of your site. The more links you have, the better your ranking is for key search terms. The better your ranking, the more people will find your site.
• Leave helpful comments in relevant blog posts with your web address (thus creating a link to your site).
• Create pages in the top 25 social media sites (i.e., Facebook, YouTube, etc.) and post to them often.
• Ask other sites to include your site in its offerings. Ask major blog directories to include your blog.

We believe that web development and marketing must be seen in the context of the long run. It’s impossible to do all this in a series of days or weeks or months. We do marketing every day and take it in small bites. We do it as time allows, but it gets done.

Answering Questions

You will find that it’s not nearly as bad as some make it out to be. I discovered this when marketing a national media campaign. We were the best known public service campaign in America; but few contacted us for an elaborate discussion, most wanted a quick answer to a question or a had suggestion to offer.

If you have prepared materials your burden will be relatively small. But the heart and soul of social media is personal interaction when asked. I do not hesitate to pick up the phone and call the person. We need to know what others think of us and our services.

New and Shiny Things

One of the biggest mistakes people new to social media make is chasing every new and shiny thing that comes down the pike. There are some people (including us) who cannot leave good enough alone. If you developed your blog or web site with WordPress, then you have an endless array of themes, widgets and plug-ins to choose from. I wasted many, many hours looking at new applications that in the long run meant little to nothing to the quality of my site. Stick to basics. You have enough to worry about. Create a site that serves your users and move on.

Resources

Find the best resources. Go to the big retail outlets on the web that specialize in books. Search for books that describe themselves as basic or for newcomers or for “dummies.” They will take the time to offer explanations for people without social media backgrounds. Search for “social media” or ‘podcasting” or “blogs” or “marketing.” Do not get anything that assumes prior knowledge.

There is another source for related terms such as social media, Twitter, podcasting, etc. called the Common Craft store on YouTube. It provides simple explanations for these and many additional terms. Please do not be put off by their simplicity. Sometimes, simplicity is just what you need to learn or to explain terms to others.

Bandwidth

Your IT people may object to the use of internal servers due to security issues of lack of capacity. Using outside web site hosting companies, which can start at approximately $10.00 a month, can put an end to objections.

Change

Search engines do not like change, and you may pay a temporary price in search visibility. But you may find that your original plan doesn’t work or you see a need to take the site in a different direction. It’s a normal part of the process. Make your changes to the site and marketing efforts as soon as practical and move on.

Conclusions

There are endless additional considerations when creating social media sites and there are existing materials that address them. But most issues seem to fall into the categories discussed:

• Management needs to know what they want to do and provide resources. There is no single definition of a successful social media strategy.
• Establishing your key words at the beginning and integrating them into every aspect of your site is crucial.
• You can’t expect one person to create, populate, write for and market your web site. The necessary skills are often beyond the capacity of one person alone. You may be great at writing code but marketing and web writing and document creation is foreign to you, yet all are necessary skills.
• You and your managers need to understand the purpose of a social media site. Static sites have their place (but it’s diminishing). Interactive sites require resources or they will not work.
• Market your site in bits you can deal with. We market every day. We do not try to take on the entire marketing effort at one time.
• Unless you are J.C. Penney, you will not spend every waking moment of your professional life answering questions. But spend time with inquiries that cannot be answered simply. They often provide more in insight than you provide in terms of information.
• Don’t chase every new “shiny thing” that comes along. Most are time wasters.
• Get the right (basic—very basic) reference materials.
• Bandwidth is no longer an issue if you hire outside companies to supply it.
• Change is normal. Make your changes as soon as possible in the development process.

-Timothy Barnes
-Len Sipes

The authors are public affairs and IT specialists at an independent Federal agency.

Back

By Leonard A. Sipes, Jr.

In Washington, D.C. offenders on community supervision—probation, parole, or supervised release—face a new impediment to criminal activity and non-compliance:  GPS tracking, which monitors the individual’s whereabouts 24 hours per day.

The Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency (CSOSA), the federal agency that supervises these offenders in the nation’s capital, has been using GPS since April 2003.  About 800 offenders are currently in the program.  While there are no national statistics available on the extent of GPS use nationwide, CSOSA may have one of the largest GPS programs in the country.

 “GPS is a wonderful tool to help protect society,” states Carlton Butler, supervisor of the unit that oversees CSOSA’s GPS program.  “We share our GPS technology with law enforcement agencies in D.C and throughout the area. They have the ability to look at any of our offenders and see if they can place them at a crime scene, which they do numerous times throughout the week.”

CSOSA supervises about 15,000 offenders, about half of whom are in treatment or on a specialized caseload.  The agency emphasizes evidence-based practices in case management; GPS is just one of the strategies it employs to promote compliance.  It is typically employed as a sanction for non-compliance among high-risk offenders and offenders with specific geographic limitations (such as stay-away orders).  It is also used to monitor high-risk offenders who refuse to maintain or actively seek employment. GPS is among the most severe sanctions that CSOSA can impose. 

As of September 2008, offenders on GPS were distributed as follows:

-       38 percent of the offenders were on general supervision;

-       19 percent were on mental health supervision;

-       13 percent were on specialized supervision for high-risk substance abusers;

-       11 percent were on sex offender supervision;

-       10 percent were on interstate supervision; and

-       9 percent were on domestic violence supervision.

“In addition to sex offenders, we place high risk and domestic violence offenders on GPS,” says Thomas H. Williams, Associate Director for Community Supervision Services at CSOSA. “In the past, a domestic violence offender could stalk a victim without our knowing it. Now we know and can notify both the victim and our law enforcement partners and take swift and certain action in conjunction with the courts or parole commission.”  

GPS can greatly increase Community Supervision Officers’ (CSOs’) ability to protect the public.  The following case illustrates how quickly GPS data can make a difference.  Last year, the local news in Washington, D.C. reported a string of assaults on teenage girls in a particular neighborhood.  Police provided a sketch of the suspect to the media in order to solicit the public’s assistance with the investigation; truthfully, the police had little else to go on.

An alert CSO saw the sketch on the news broadcast and recognized the subject as a high-risk parolee on GPS.  She immediately checked the individual’s whereabouts at the times of the assaults and placed him at the crime scenes.  The next day, she visited his home to verify that his car matched the description of the vehicle used in the crimes.  She then arranged for the man to come into her office, where he was arrested by Metropolitan Police Department officers.

 An Enormous Responsibility

Implementing GPS tracking places an enormous responsibility on any agency.  While CSOSA has stringent contact standards, requiring eight contacts per month for offenders at the highest risk levels, GPS provides a great deal of additional information on each offender in the program.  Learning to interpret and respond to that information is a challenge for even the most experienced CSOs.

Generally, the CSO will review two daily reports provided by the vendor: (1) a daily summary on each offender, covering the last 36 hours and indicating whether the GPS unit transmitted appropriately and whether the offender remained in compliance with location parameters the CSO had previously defined, and (2) an incident report, which details whether offenders on GPS were in the vicinity of crime locations reported by the Metropolitan Police Department.  The CSO can also review the actual tracking report, which shows the offender’s movements through the city.  For some types of offenders, including sex offenders, daily review of the tracking report is a must.

Paul Brennan, a Supervisory Community Supervision Officer for one of CSOSA’s sex offender teams, demonstrates his ability to interpret the tracking report.  He pulls up the report, which follows the movements of a particular sex offender on the previous day.  With a few keystrokes, Brennan lays a detailed map of the city over the tracking report.  For an even higher level of detail, he superimposes satellite images from Google Earth over the offender’s movements.  Suddenly, a daycare center with a playground appears in the offender’s path.  Brennan now has a good idea why that sex offender has been loitering in the area.  He and his time also have targeted intelligence to share with the police and to inform their own surveillance and case management activities.

“We use polygraph tests, GPS, drug testing, surveillance and other forms of human and technological intelligence with our sex offenders, but we are only as good as our ability to interpret and react to the data we get,” Brennan says.  “We are not perfect, and offenders will test the capabilities of the system, but we have some of the best tools in the country to provide accountability while getting offenders into programs they need.”

Offenders try to “get around” GPS in a variety of ways—some as simple as failing to charge the unit, wrapping the unit in aluminum foil, or attempting to cut it off.   One of the ways that GPS is tamper-resistant is “double” monitoring, in which the offender is tracked not just by satellite but by cell phone towers as well.  GPS transmission may be hampered in large buildings or homes, but supplemental devices can be placed in those buildings to continue transmission.

For an overview of GPS implementation challenges, including CSOSA’s program, see Global Positioning System (GPS) Technology for Community Supervision: Lessons Learned (http://www.noblis.org/ BusinessAreas/CriminalJustice/GPS_(low_res_4.1Mb).pdf).

National Trends

GPS and satellite tracking seem poised to play a significant role in the system’s ability to protect society and place and keep offenders in programs.   Many think use of this technology will grow significantly in coming years.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) of the US Department of Justice states in Prison and Jail Inmates at Midyear 2000 that 16 percent of offenders in the community were under electronic monitoring. BJS’s Prison Inmates at Midyear 2007 and Jail Inmates at Midyear 2007 suggest close to 10,000 people are on electronic monitoring.  (In both cases, these data include older radio-frequency devices as well as GPS.)

Peggy Conway is an independent consultant on the use of GPS tracking and editor of The Journal of Offender Monitoring. She states, “To date the number offenders being tracked in the US has grown by more than 60 percent each year and in many cases doubled. With approximately 40,000 offenders under passive or active GPS tracking, growth is expected to continue at 35 – 50 percent per year for at least the next several years.”

GPS or satellite tracking introduces a new element in the supervision of criminal offenders.  If 84 percent of the offenders in this country are supervised three times a month or less (Characteristics of State Parole Supervising Agencies, 2006, BJS, http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/ bjs/abstract/cspsa06.htm) then the ability to track an offender every minute of every day provides new opportunities and challenges for the criminal justice system. 

Criminological research has consistently emphasized the importance of immediate response to violations for those under supervision. Traditionally, however, parole and probation agencies, parole commissions and the courts have been slow to take action, sometimes waiting months for a hearing before actions are taken in response to reported violations. The nationwide adoption of intermediate sanctions (i.e., increased reporting or drug testing, community service, or brief periods of incarceration) to respond to such violations greatly helps, but agencies need to be in frequent contact for these sanctions to be imposed most effectively.

GPS increases officers’ awareness of potential violations.  The offender’s non-compliance with GPS—attempting to tamper with the device or the signal—also constitutes a serious violation in itself.

While few evaluations of GPS programs have been completed to date, it is safe to assume that, like any endeavor to supervise and assist criminal offenders, it will not work all the time.  In a meta-analytic review, the Washington State Institute for Public Policy (http://www.wsipp.wa.gov/ rptfiles/06-10-1201.pdf) indicates that the best of adult community supervision strategies will reduce recidivism on average by approximately 20 percent.

One of the few evaluations that include both GPS and radio frequency monitoring was completed in 2006 by Florida State University’s College of Criminology and Criminal Justice.  The study (Under Surveillance: An Empirical Test of the Effectiveness and Consequences of Electronic Monitoring) concludes that electronic monitoring has produced promising results:

“Overall, Florida’s program is found to provide an effective public safety alternative to prison for serious offenders, including those convicted of murder/manslaughter, sex offenses, robbery, and other violent offenses…[O]ur findings indicate that electronic monitoring actually reduces the likelihood of revocation for a technical violation for offenders on home confinement. More importantly, electronic monitoring also reduces the likelihood of revocation for a new offense [emphasis added] and the likelihood of absconding which demonstrates a positive effect on public safety.”

The authors conclude:  “…[I]t appears likely that the use of electronic monitoring devices will increase dramatically in the very near future.”

Another publication, Report on New Jersey’s GPS Monitoring of Sex Offenders, 2007, http://www.state.nj.us/parole/docs/reports/gps.pdf, claims that only one of 225 sex offenders has been implicated in a new sex crime, although 19 other offenders were charged with non-sex crimes or technical violations while on GPS supervision.

Not every evaluation is as positive.  An early evaluation of outcomes of the San Diego High Risk Sex Offender GPS Pilot Program was not supportive of reduced recidivism in every category. Absconding, however, showed a significant decease. (See http://ucicorrections.seweb.uci.edu/files/ HRSO_GPS_Pilot_Program.pdf.)

 Improved Public Safety

GPS is a useful tool in community supervision, but even this level of tracking does not ensure compliance.  “It’s not foolproof,” Paul Brennan says.  “Nothing’s foolproof. If people want ironclad guarantees that the offender will not commit additional crimes in the community, their only alternative is prison.”

Despite its limitations, however, GPS helps CSOSA achieve its goal of protecting the public through effective community supervision.  “We can provide the citizens of the metropolitan area with improved public safety,” says Thomas Williams.  Because of its contribution to the bottom line, GPS will continue to be part of CSOSA’s supervision strategy.

Law Enforcement’s and Community Correction’s Use of GPS

By Leonard A. Sipes, Jr.

Brian Glover is an eight-year veteran of Washington, D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department (MPD). He patrols the fifth district in northeast D.C.  A couple of years ago, he heard something about the local parole and probation authority putting criminal offenders on Global Positioning System (GPS) tracking.

“I started to notice that some of the offenders we run into were wearing cell phones on their right ankles.  So, I took a training course offered by the parole and probation people and learned that I can track the movements of these guys right from the computer in my car, and I think that this is the greatest thing since sliced bread.  Every time a crime is committed in my patrol area, I can find out if one of these guys was at the crime scene or close by.”

Lt. Michael J. Farish (a supervisor working on homicides, cold cases and special investigations) likes the capabilities GPS brings to criminal investigations. “Maybe the most important tool in the use of GPS is not the ability to place an offender at the crime scene, although that happens, but the ability to tell who was in the immediate area. We track these people down and get important leads that solve homicides and a variety of additional crimes. They may not have done the crime, but they may know who did. Or maybe this person was holding the gun or driving the get-away car or just out for a smoke. But just having someone close to the crime scene can produce valuable information.”

Capt. Mario Patrizio (Commander of Special Investigations) knew immediately in 2006 that the use of GPS on offenders was going to be an important investigative tool. “Our detectives are mandated to check the list of new crimes against the GPS data. Every day, we do hundreds of checks.”

In Northeast Washington, D.C., an offender was sexually assaulting teenage girls who were walking in their communities. A sketch of the assailant supplied by the Metropolitan Police Department was recognized by a Community Supervision Officer (CSO–referred to as Parole and Probation Agent or Officer in the rest of the country) who, through GPS, placed the offender at the scenes on the exact days and times of the assaults. 

The CSO is an employee of the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency (CSOSA).  CSOSA is a federal, executive branch agency providing parole and probation services to residents of Washington, D.C. It was established in August of 2000. The agency prides itself as one of the most technologically sophisticated community supervision agencies in the country. The agency believes that with accountability and opportunity for programs, increasing numbers of offenders can avoid future criminality. CSOSA has been using GPS or satellite tracking since 2005 and currently has approximately 800 people on the system.

While there are no formal yearly counts of GPS use across the country, CSOSA may have one of the largest GPS programs based on the ratio of GPS use for the population available for supervision.

Does GPS Help Prevent Crime?

CSOSA’s Associate Director for Community Supervision Services believes that the use of GPS can prevent crimes. Thomas Williams (with over 20 years of experience) is a veteran of community supervision administration at the highest levels. “There are a wide variety of offenders who are looking for a way out of the criminal lifestyle. They want normalcy in their lives, but their friends and associates can drag them down.  GPS stiffens their backbone. If an offender’s criminal associates know that he’s on GPS, well, they certainly don’t want him around during the commission of a crime.”

Lt. Farish also feels that GPS can prevent criminality. “Criminal offenders on supervision really need to do the right thing. They often have prior arrests, convictions and periods of supervision with CSOSA. Everyone wants them to be successful when coming out of prison or being placed on probation. It’s impossible to put everyone in prison, so the more they succeed, the more the community is protected. The device seems to give some the courage to do the right thing.”

In February of 2006, the College of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the Florida State University published a paper evaluating Florida’s statewide home confinement and electronic monitoring program, Under Surveillance: An Empirical Test of the Effectiveness and Consequences of Electronic Monitoring. The study found that “Overall, Florida’s program is found to  provide an effective public safety alternative to prison for serious offenders, including those convicted of murder/manslaughter, sex offenses, robbery, and other violent offenses.” The report continues…”our findings indicate that electronic monitoring actually reduces the likelihood of revocation for a technical violation for offenders on home confinement. More importantly, electronic monitoring also reduces the likelihood of revocation for a new offense and the likelihood of absconding which demonstrates a positive effect on public safety.”

The study, which included offenders placed on home confinement through radio frequency monitoring as well as those on and GPS/satellite tracking is consistent with our experience in Washington, D.C.

 The Issue of Interagency Cooperation

CSOSA and the Metropolitan Police Department share information on an ongoing basis at the headquarters, district and officer levels. Metropolitan Police Department and Community Supervision Officers conduct announced and unannounced home visits (called Accountability Tours) of new and high-risk offenders. MPD staff also participates in CSOSA’s Mass Orientation program, which informs offenders new to supervision of CSOSA’s expectations for them while under supervision.  There are joint endeavors to serve warrants and to create leads for homicides and serious crimes. (Please see http://media.csosa.gov for a blog containing additional articles of MPD/CSOSA interagency partnerships.)

Officer Glover states that he likes the GPS program for the communication it provides between himself and the CSOs. “If I discover that someone on the street may be causing problems, and he’s not working, I’ll ask the CSO to put him on GPS or in CSOSA’s Day Reporting Center program.  I also can access CSOSA’s information system, SMART (Supervision, Management and Automated Record system), to determine the name of the CSO and call or send him or her an e-mail. “

“Recently, I had a guy who was taking a lot of items to pawn shops, and he was under CSOSA’s supervision, so I asked CSOSA to put him on GPS tracking. Within weeks, we were able to tie him into several burglaries. I’m also able to tell CSOSA’s sex offender unit when someone is hanging out at school or playground. “

When asked if he is this vigilant because of his veteran status, he states that his fellow officers are taking increased interest in the use of GPS data and asking CSOSA to place additional offenders on the program. “The level of information exchange is improving,” he states.

Capt. Patrizio and Lt. Farish cite the case of a retired MPD officer who was shot while resisting a robbery outside of his house after watching a Monday night football game.  The officer was walking his brother to his car when two guys walked past and returned a short time later and announced a robbery. MPD asked CSOSA to immediately run offenders through the GPS system. That allowed detectives to concentrate on interviews and evidence collection. Within minutes, CSOSA personnel were able to place a suspect 11 feet away from the crime scene at the precise time and date of the crime.

The Future of GPS

Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) data for parole and probation (see Parole and Probation Statistics—Adults on probation, and Adults on parole– spreadsheets, http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pandp.htm) state that there were 12,232 offenders on electronic monitoring on parole and 17,763 on electronic monitoring for probation in 2006. 

The term electronic monitoring does not necessarily indicate the use of GPS or Satellite tracking. Electronic monitoring could include radio frequency devices tethered to a telephone for supervision in the home or immediate area.

The use of  GPS tracking is growing throughout the country. Peggy Conway is the editor of The Journal of Offender Monitoring. She states, “To date the number offenders being tracked in the US has grown by more than 60% each year.”

To Carlton Butler, CSOSA’s GPS Manager, who supervises the provision of GPS equipment to offenders, it’s only going to grow. “We are in partnership with MPD and other law enforcement agencies, and many officers would like to see the continued, beneficial use of GPS.  The spirit of cooperation is strong, and the exchange of information is increasing.”

But to Capt. Patrizio and Lt. Farish, it’s simply an idea whose time has come.  It’s a way to prevent crime and help some offenders do what needs to be done to straighten themselves out.  But with respect to  violent law breakers, “The quicker we get them off the streets, the safer the city will be. With CSOSA as our partner, we can help offenders get the programs they need and make the city safer,” states Mario Patrizio.

From  “Community Policing Dispatch,”  August, 2009, US Department of Justice

In world history there have been few fundamental shifts in how people move through society, but right now such a shift is occurring. For centuries, people were introduced and became connected face-to-face. Today social media outlets provide unparalleled levels of information sharing and social networking. Nielson Media reported that “the number of social media users has increased 87 percent since 2003, and surpassed e-mail use for the first time in February” and “in the past year, the time spent on social networks increased 73 percent” according to a May 2009 article in the San Francisco Chronicle. Though research indicates that a well-crafted social web site (catering to learning styles—friendly with story-based articles fact sheets and interesting video and audio) can have a huge impact, the nature of that impact can have either a tremendously useful or dangerously detrimental effect.

If an event occurs, word travels the Internet instantaneously. With new technologies and cheap bandwidth, anyone with a basic understanding of website creation and search engine optimization can produce a site in mere hours. Cameras and software can shoot and lift video to You Tube in minutes. The danger is that an organization devoted to misinformation might control public opinion faster and better than a public agency.

San Antonio police encountered this problem when an impostor set up a fake San Antonio Police Department account. Though mostly harmless, the twitterers (as Twitter account holders are known) used the official seal of the police department on their page and posted law enforcement themed-tweets (Twitter posts). Although the department successfully had the account removed from Twitter, their experience illustrates the potential dangers in the new era of information sharing. If the department had already made their own official Twitter, the fake account would never have deceived the citizens of San Antonio. Thus, having social networking account can prevent risks to public safety.

Additionally, social networking sites allow government agencies to reach out to their public like never before. Story-based articles, fact sheets, audio and video provide users with a personal, comfortable and meaningful experience. In the words of a writer for Advertising Age Magazine, “Brands need to have a personality and be someone that people want to be friends with.” Law enforcement agencies are all brands, and in many cases their images could be improved. Police departments are increasingly creating Facebook and Twitter accounts to reach their public in new ways. The personal profile elements of Facebook give a human quality to departments by listing personal interests and favorite quotes and allowing members of the public to be-“friend” them. Meanwhile the limited text and mass broadcast of Twitter posts allow agencies to keep their citizenry informed up-to-the-minute. As Lakeland, Florida’s Assistant Police Chief Bill LePere told CNN. “Expecting the local print media to pick [a tradiotional media release] up and run it in the newspaper tomorrow is 24 hours too late.”

CNN.com reports that “public safety officials are finding the use of sites to be not only speedy but a convenient way to distribute press releases, amber alerts, road closings, and suspect descriptions.” Twitter accounts provide users with major updates in 140 characters or less and links to more detailed information can be posted as well. Better yet, sites offer a free avenue for disseminating information in a tough economic climate. Thanks to advertising, neither the twitterer or the follower need to pay for the communication thereby eliminating cost barriers that might otherwise prevent valuable information spreading.

The experiences of police departments from Boston, Massachusetts to Chatanooga, Tennessee (both of which have Twitter accounts) illustrate that social media can be of great value to law enforcement agencies. Social media sites are a perfect outlet for community policing as they allow for both outreach and prevention. Websites provide social tools that let agencies communicate with and engage their public. By forming even casual electronic relationships with residents, departments are able to improve their status and stature within the community. Furthermore sites like Twitter and Facebook provide a private forum for members of the community to communicate valuable information about a suspect or simply their public safety concerns to the police. Information sharing with the public has always been a priority of law enforcement. Yet never before has opportunity for a direct dialogue with the public existed on such a vast scale. Social media enables agencies to accomplish preexisting operational goals by facilitating the transfer of specific and targeted information in efficient and innovative ways.

Leonard Sipes
Special Contributor
and

Meghan Burns
Special Contributor
The COPS Office

DC’s Fugitive Safe Surrender Prompts 530 Offenders with Warrants to Voluntarily Surrender in a Church

By Leonard A. Sipes, Jr. Edited by Cedric Hendricks

It’s not easy to understand why anyone with a warrant would voluntarily surrender to law enforcement.  But I spoke to many offenders during an event in the nation’s capitol who told me that they were looking for a safe opportunity to turn themselves in. They wanted another chance to return into normal society.

But they and family members needed to learn about the program and be convinced that it wasn’t a scam. We had to earn their trust. We did that through social and conventional media efforts. This may have been one of the first efforts on the part of a federal agency to use social media during a campaign.

The thrust of this article is not Fugitive Safe Surrender in Washington, D.C. (www.dcsafesurrender.org) but an overview of the possibilities that social media affords the criminal justice community. By social media, I’m referring to radio and television on the Internet (podcasting), articles on the Internet (bloging) combined with more traditional efforts such as web site creation, a telephone answering system, e-mail and radio and television ads.

Fugitive Safe Surrender in DC

Before we delve into social media we need a quick overview of Fugitive Safe Surrender in Washington:

The effort encouraged those wanted for non-violent felony or misdemeanor crimes in the District of Columbia to surrender voluntarily to faith-based leaders and law enforcement in a church. Fugitive Safe Surrender recognizes that many offenders are looking for a way out.  The program provides an opportunity for individuals wanted for non-violent offenses to resolve their warrants and get on with their lives.  Surrendering within the confines of a church (or other religious entity) provides the assurance that they will be treated safely and fairly.

Fugitive Safe Surrender (FSS) was successfully implemented by the US Marshals Service in six cities where over 6,000 people surrendered.  Those participating generally go home that day with a new court date or have their charges adjudicated on the spot. Violent offenders (yes, they surrendered as well) are held for trial.

The entire criminal justice community in D.C. came together to create the structure for FSS. I was asked to lead the public information effort. 

530 offenders with violent and non-violent warrants surrendered in a church in northeast Washington D.C. over the course of three days during November of 2007.  There was extensive media coverage.

Social Media

Explaining why an offender would voluntarily surrender is easier than explaining social media. Social media is more a philosophy rather than a list of strategies.

One of the lead agencies for FSS was my agency, the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency in Washington, D.C (a federal, executive branch entity). We do a series of radio and television programs under the banner of “DC Public Safety” at http://media.csosa.gov. The program includes a blog (articles) and transcripts. Some consider it the most popular criminal justice radio and television Internet site in the nation.

But the use of radio or television or blogs or transcripts or any other form of social media is not the point; they exist to create a comfortable experience for the user. People learn in a wide variety of formats. Some want to read while others want to listen or watch. For those who want to read, it’s preferable that the document be “story based” with an emphasis on enjoyment and readability.  Audio and video programs need to follow the same philosophy.

Why?

The criminal justice system, like all bureaucracies, is usually conservative when it comes to news ways of communicating.  As someone who has spent close to 30 years in communications for national and state criminal justice agencies, I understand the complexities and resource limitations.

Social media opportunities available for criminal justice agencies are enormous and very cost effective. Radio shows for the Internet (podcasting) can be done for cost of a computer and an additional $500.00 for equipment and broadband access.  Once purchased, you have almost unlimited opportunities to communicate with a local and national audience without additional cost.

The primary objective of social media is a personal, non-bureaucratic style of communicating that respects various learning styles and encourages the development of conversations with the public and media.

The bottom line is that social media, in combination with traditional media, creates a powerful and effective method of communicating. You can accomplish organizational operational goals effectively with social media.

Social Media and FSS

When we brainstormed media outreach efforts for Fugitive Safe Surrender, we realized that money was very tight and that Washington, D.C. is an expensive market to communicate in. Campaigns like ours usually depend on unassigned airtime donated by radio and television stations. In a market like D.C., available free air-time is almost nonexistent (especially for TV).

Planed bus ads and timely television ads were cut due to budget. Money for a telephone answering system and web site dried up. This left us with radio ads developed through the Broadcaster’s Association, a telephone answering system cobbled together from our telephone system and a web site created by Mary Anderson (webmaster) from my agency (www.dcsafesurrender.org).  It became clear that our use of social media would go from an accessory to a primary strategy.

The first thing we did was to go to a city that had already conducted a successful FSS (Indianapolis) and do interviews with offenders who surrendered. We were able to get compelling testimony from them and family members as well as judges who heard the cases. That testimony was mounted on our web site.

The radio and television ads that we had produced were mounted on the website. This established a one-stop shopping opportunity for offenders, their families and the media.

The concept of social media embraces the personalization of communications. To insure that we knew what to communicate and how to communicate, we conducted three focus groups of offenders under our supervision. It was the focus groups where we discovered that friends and family members would do the bulk of the research on FSS and the majority had Internet access.  We now knew who we were talking to and how to reach them. But to be on the safe side, we implemented a telephone answering system with recorded messages.

We created radio ads in Spanish to accommodate that part of our population.

We created a radio show that fully explained the program.

We mounted easy to understand print materials on the web site.

All radio and television ads referred people back to the web site and telephone answering system.

We posted the radio and television ads on the same server used by our “DC Public Safety” programs.

But possibly the most powerful strategy was to interview the first person in line to surrender every day. The interviews were mounted on the web site by Enterprise Architect Timothy Barnes and publicized to media via e-mail and press release within an hour of their creation. 

These individuals told compelling stories that resonated with the mainstream media and they presented those stories to the public at a crucial time of the campaign. One offender walked several miles to the site beginning at 3:00 a.m. at the request of his mother (it was her birthday). He described the surrendering process as a pilgrimage for change to a new life. He and several additional offenders agreed to be interviewed by mainstream media which furthered coverage.

Throughout the process, we looked for additional compelling stories to tell. We understood that story-based accounts communicated better than a public safety angle.

Results

The social and traditional media approach employed (with very little money) worked beyond our expiations with 530 surrendering during the three day process.  Friends and family members told us how they heard the radio ad and went to the web site and how the audio and video ads and testimonies of prior participants convinced them that the effort was legitimate. They became so comfortable with the process that surrendering mothers brought in their children. Some offenders were accompanied by multiple family members and friends. A son recently released from prison brought in his father for a theft warrant.

It’s important to understand that the social media approach worked with reporters, DJ’s, talk show hosts and their management. Several told us that they thought that the program was a bit silly until they went to the web site and listened to the audio and watched the video. The web site convinced them that this was a program worth investing in and, through the stories we provided, they helped us to publicize the program.

Podcasting and other forms of social media are powerful strategies that everyone can use. Whether it’s a quick form of emergency notification, getting the word out about a dangerous criminal or talking about new strategies, citizens and their leaders like the informal and informational aspects of audio, video and story based written material.

It’s time for all of us within the criminal justice system to use social media tactics within our own communities.

Articles on social media, podcasting and community outreach for criminal justice agencies are available through our blog at http://media.csosa.gov.  I look forward to your suggestions.