Glasgow and West Midlands

This week has been very busy for us, darting around various parts of Scotland and England.

Wednesday started with us parting ways.  Lauren travelled to Glasgow to take part in an ALISS workshop – her first adventure as a Futuregov associate, presenting the ethos of mypolice and engaging in discussions to develop a blueprint for an information hub that will enhance existing information services and provide a platform for developing innovative new services for people with long term health issues.

I was in Birmingham at the West Midlands Police Headquarters with various speakers from the policing 2.0 conference including Nick Keane, Will Perrin, PC Ed Rogerson, Assitant chief constable Gordon Scobie, Chief Inspector Mark Payne, Nicky Getgood and Nick Booth to name but a few.

The agenda for the morning was catching up and planning what comes next after the policing2.0 conference.  With a heightened profile from the BBC article: Police open up to social media and Nick’s recent visit to number 10, the meeting brought together both insiders and outsiders from police to draft up plans as to how social media can be introduced to the UK’s police forces as a positive tool to add to their toolkit.

“Let’s get out there before we get left behind” – Gordon Scobbie

And now, with a sense of urgency, the general feeling is if the police don’t catch up, social media will just run away from them.

What interested me about the meeting was that there was a clear understanding and agreement amongst all parties that social media and the way in which we understand it is through familiarising ourselves with it, and it’s about self discovery and how it works best for you, therefore setting out clear rules on how to use it would not be an effective way of introducing it to the police.

What needs to be tackled is the police’s (and in my experience goes across lots of different sectors) risk averse culture.  Afterall, someone had said at the policing2.0 conference last week that if you can trust a police officer to walk down the street with a machine gun, you can trust them to update their facebook status.

And so, a plan has been agreed.  The members of the room, who could be called the ‘change agents’, are going to share best practice in a public forum.  Detailing their use of social media, how they used it, and what went well, and perhaps didn’t.  In this way we can learn from each others mistakes and achievements, in a more human way to understand how social media can work.

Secondly by sharing best practice online, and talking to one another, we can see what each police force is doing, and perhaps a new technology, application (or we can discuss offline initiatives too) can be shared and stop replication of similar schemes, ultimately saving money.  What is needed is more conversation between police forces, there’s a lot of fantastic work going on, but it’s just not being shared.

“I would encourage forces to have a go. What is the worst that can happen? More importantly, think of the best case scenario. Improved communications, better confidence, engaged and informed communities.  Why are we waiting?”- Mark Payne

As an end note, I’d like to include Mark Payne’s blog post, he summed up the thoughts from the day brilliantly and made a fantastic case for police adopting and engaging with social media.

Finally something resonated with me whilst watching usnow,

“A revolution doesn’t happen when a society adopts new tools, a revolution happens when a society adopts new behaviours” – Clay Shirky

This is an exciting step into a new way of policing, less broadcast, more listening.  Policing becomes more about conversing with the public, rather than setting the agenda.  If social media can change the behavior of the police and create new types of interaction, new ways of policing, new responses, we’ll be looking at a fundamental shift in the way our police service operate.