Police use of social media (part 3)
This is the final part in the series and an approximate 10 minute read.
As we conclude this three part series, it’s important we re-examine what we’ve discussed so far.
In part one we looked at the most common types of police accounts on Twitter, from public, service-level accounts through to personal, anonymised. In part two we did a deep dive into two of the most problematic groups of police use of social media, especially on Twitter; sexual misconduct and vitriolic anonymous accounts, both of which have the potential to cause severe reputational harm.
In this final piece we’re going to discuss the future of police use of social media and the issues we need to address and overcome.
Organisational barriers
How do we tackle this issue?
For me, it first comes down to the organisation recognising that social media, especially Twitter, plays two functions; community engagement and broadcasting, and a police resource, both professionally and personally. Until those in positions of power and influence recognise the benefits of social media, we won’t get the subsequent policies defining use and boundaries etc.
Having chief constables update their social media strategy to state that, should anyone in their service have a personal social media account and make a single reference to the fact that they are police – from photos of them in uniform through to discussing jobs they’ve attended – means they will face disciplinary proceedings is not the way to go. The worst part being that this particular updated strategy (which isn’t a “strategy” at all) comes from a service that is informally considered a national lead in social media.
You can’t gaslight new recruits with “welcome” posters, inviting them to join the “police family”, highlighting services’ diversity and inclusion, then act like a dictatorship, which doesn’t welcome innovative thinking. It’s an oxymoron of the highest order and incredibly detrimental to those joining, and already serving, officers and staff members.
In order to navigate social media as both a public engagement tool and a police resource, it means understanding the ever-changing parameters of social media and having supportive, and engaging, services, comms teams and senior leaders who understand there are a great many positives to social media when its capabilities and potential reach are honed. However, social media moves quickly, which means that complaints also need to be communicated on and actioned quickly, something which many of the police disciplinary processes and services don’t currently allow.
I also believe we need to make sure that any social media complaints are disciplined proportionately. Many could be dealt with by a swift and simple “Reflective Practice, Review Process”, not an eight month gross misconduct procedure resulting in “No Further Action”. There is a huge difference in being transparent and accountable as services, and kowtowing to perceived public outrage around an officer’s ill-timed or misguided tweet. The converse being that some tweets or social media updates, display damaging attitudes and beliefs by the officers, which do need to be appropriately questioned and disciplined by their services. We see this in abundance, when an instance of police failure goes mainstream, and many anonymous police accounts (and even some public-facing) have been seen to question victims’ lived experiences when they have had the bravery to share their stories and trauma online. Several of us have tried to highlight how this dismissal looks to victims who haven’t yet reported their crimes, but to limited impact sadly.
However, as an organisation, we also have to proactively, and robustly, defend ourselves against “hurt feelings”. That means that when a social media video, for example, starts to gain traction we have senior leaders who will quickly publicly defend their officers, or be transparent about protocol, such as referring the incident to the IOPC. Our senior leaders’ inability and unwillingness to defend our people against “armchair experts” is part of the problem and an area that absolutely must be improved with a sense of urgency.
That being said, many inside the organisation, when defending themselves as individuals or the organisation as a whole, often dismiss any opinion that comes from outside the Job to be “armchair experts”, as in people that don’t have the specific police knowledge to question a certain decision. However, there are many outside of policing who know enough about its practices and policies to make well-judged comment and critique and such constructive criticism should be welcomed, not dismissed or insulted. Contrary to popular police opinion, not all of us outside of the organisation “don’t have a clue” but the exact opposite; it’s precisely because we do know the organisation, it’s practices and people, that we can and do view it in a more objective, and therefore potentially beneficial, light which encourages the exact kind of innovative thinking the police want, on paper, but reject in reality.
Although we have 43 services that are inherently run differently, despite national guidance and policies on many topics, I still believe we need clear, national guidelines around police use of social media that, whilst highlighting negative consequences, doesn’t dwell on them. There are many incredible positives to be had from police use of social media, from official and individual accounts (far outweighing the negative), which I fear will be lost to cookie-cutter, corporate word salad tweets (as below) and accounts instead of tailored, and engaging, content that truly benefits our communities.
But in the age of the ongoing anti-police narrative, misinformation and (detrimental) “armchair experts”, positive police role models – those with public-facing individual accounts – are needed now more than ever to balance it out. Do we want society and new recruits to read about “institutionalised” police failures and corruption (for example) from agenda-based mainstream media, or do we want people to see what policing genuinely looks like; warts and all? I can think of MPS fed rep Sgt Kamran Qureshi (sadly, no longer on Twitter) who regularly discussed his work as a rep and both the organisational issues, and benefits, surrounding it. Or PC Tom Van Der Wee who tweets about his shifts with reality but compassion and regularly engages when members of the public who ask him questions.
Senior leaders
For me, senior leaders (from Chief Inspector upward) have the greatest responsibility and opportunity to “turn the tanker” as the cliched saying goes. Why? Because they set the tone on everything from how empowered individuals feel within the organisation to fostering toxic cultures, that can lead to demonstrable (and long lasting) collateral damage, for colleagues and even members of the public.
If our officers and staff can see a senior leader who has an engaging police account that holds the balance between broadcasting and engagement, they will mirror such behaviours and greatly improve the wider discussion. But even as an outsider I regularly see senior leaders with bland, broadcast accounts, tweeting sporadically because they don’t understand the importance of an online presence, which becomes a gap that the individual public-facing and anonymous police accounts seek to fill.
If you follow many MPS senior leaders on Twitter, for example, they mostly retweet MPS statements or congratulate a team when an arrest can be made public. They’re miniature broadcast accounts that get virtually no engagement, and therefore the statistical reach comms teams want and, actually, get even less reach than their official service accounts; the irony. The only real exception to this in the Met was Chief Supt Raj Kholi (albeit he has recently changed services) who regularly, particularly during the protests and subsequent riots last year, took the time to defend his service and teams from disinformation and engagement from “armchair experts” on the realities of public order policing. And again Chief Constable Nick Adderley who had me howling at my phone with his recent “bite me” retort.
Unfortunately, with today’s level of required transparency in the organisation, senior leaders can no longer pull an officer in, have a quiet word to encourage a change of behaviour, for low-level mistakes such as a misguided tweet and be done with it. Now it’s reams of paperwork (physical or digital) and potentially 10 months of misconduct proceedings. So, to offset the amount of potential work that goes into managing and disciplining officers on social media, it seems that many want to total bans to avoid this, which is understandable in an increasingly resource-depleted organisation.
But we have to get real here; I said that many anonymous police accounts (the negative ones causing reputational harm) were vitriolic due to “rightful anger” they held toward their service and the way they were being treated and, whilst I stand by that point, I also feel it important to highlight that, as individuals behind such accounts, you still have a moral and social responsibility to be professional. Receiving poor service is not an excuse to deliver it to others. By all means, challenge the organisation and your individual services (as I do) – even other colleagues – but challenge with respect and professionalism. Descending into personal insults because you can’t agree to disagree as adults, makes you look like petty and unprofessional, and only adds weight to the argument to many of us, in and outside the organisation, that some senior leaders and chiefs are right to attempt to blanket ban police use of social media.
As I see it, and from the dozens of relationships I hold with frontline officers and senior leaders, I see two distinct mindsets apparent with police use of social media. Many on the frontline want to use it for a bit of fun in their personal time, to connect with colleagues in the “Thin Blue Line” across the country, and show the public the realities of the organisation. Whereas many senior leaders I speak to feel they’re too busy for it and don’t really understand it either.
Society often views social media as a “waste of time” and it can be. I can regularly open TikTok for a “few minutes” and suddenly find myself losing 2.5 hours of my evening. But as I said in part one; different platforms exist for different demographics and are used in different contexts. I use TikTok to learn about people, cultures and to laugh. I use Twitter to have conversations and therefore view it as an essential investment to my personal and professional life. It’s also one of my most impactful, ongoing coping mechanisms for my mental health. It allows me to be connected when I feel “lonely”, have difficult thoughts or experiences validated by others and acts as a miniature “daily diary” for my life, and many people appreciate my honesty as it helps them relate and reflect on their own lives. For some, social media is just fun, but for many of us it is a lifeline and should be respected as such. As I’ve said before, Twitter in particular is a digital police canteen and we shouldn’t underestimate the power of connectivity of it and the benefits it affords so many of our officers and staff.
Unfortunately, I haven’t come across many influential people and leaders in the organisation who don’t view social media as a time suck with limited benefit and unfortunately, until we change those outdated and misinformed perspectives and attitudes, we won’t be able to create social media policies that benefit the target audience; the general public. Whilst social media makes us more accessible than ever (often overcoming hierarchical barriers in the process), many senior leaders are choosing to retreat from engagement, instead of embracing it. There are a lot of negatives around police use of social media, as I discussed previously, and we can tackle them for the “greater good” if we want to but unfortunately the organisation, and many within it don’t appear to want to, which means the many benefits can’t be honed because the issues are “too hard” to deal with.
Police Scotland absolutely nailed it with a recent social media campaign called “Don’t be that guy”, discussing sexual harassment, which went viral on Twitter with 2.7 million views, leading those involved to be invited on to news programmes to discuss it. Admittedly, it was perfectly timed, albeit unintentionally, in the wake of the sentencing of Wayne Couzens where many were searching for a positive and tangible direction on the topic but Police Scotland, and their partner individuals and individuals, did their homework and then planned and executed their strategy perfectly. And the results were both overwhelming positive and immediate. That’s the power of good police use of social media and a precedent-setting lesson in how to get wider society proactively reflecting on behaviours, for everyones benefit.
I will say that from a personal perspective, I wouldn’t be where I am now without police Twitter, and I mean that in the most positive of ways. I support dozens of officers (mostly men) with their mental and emotional health and understand practices, policies and processes because of publications and conversations shared on Twitter. But most importantly, found professional relationships and genuine friendships who have seen me through the worst years of my life. I hold a national reputation for men in the police and the majority of that is because I see social media, not as a waste, but an investment which is paying dividends in the lives I’ve changed and saved (including my own) from the relationships borne on the network.
Conclusion
As I said at the start of this three-part piece, social media is today’s community engagement and it benefits us in the short and long term to get a better handle on it, instead of disengaging from it and our communities because we believe it’s too big a problem to understand and tackle. The problem we have is that police culture (which isn’t always socially acceptable) is spilling into the public domain and many services are choosing to ban social media use, because it’s easier than addressing the cultural and systemic issues that create and reflect these views in the first place. But it’s a slippery slope against free speech and innovative thinking when, even as an outsider, I am beginning to see teams, services and even the organisation as a whole, run as dictatorships which is in contradiction to the “police family” of equality, diversity and inclusion it invites us to believe it encourages.
Do we have a problem with police use of social media? Yes, and it needs to be quickly addressed but a blanket ban is not the solution.
There is a fine balance to be had but it can be found and more importantly should, for the benefit of our society and, more importantly, our own organisation and the thousands within it.
