MA Police Departments - Now Leveraging Social Media

Friday, May 24, 2013

Kate Nagle, GoLocalWorcester News Contributor

The game changed for how the police announce important news events last month in Boston. While nearly every news organization was rushing to break the story of the arrest of Suspect #2, it was the Twitter account of the Boston Police Department that upstaged the media and told the world that "Suspect is in Custody."

From that point on the relationship between public safety and social media changed -- and the public changed forever. GoLocalWorcester takes an in-depth look at how many social media relationships each of the Central MA cities and towns have on Facebook and Twitter and how they use those tools to communicate.

VIEW SLIDESHOW OF WHO HAS THE MOST SOCIAL MEDIA REACH PER CAPITA -- Top Ten FB, Top Ten Twitter

Worcester Most, but Not Most Impact

The Worcester Police Department's Facebook page lists a "Joined Facebook" date of January 20, 2012. Today, the Worcester Police Department has 6,822 Twitter Followers - more than any elected official or local band. The Worcester PD Twitter account is just a fraction of the Boston Police Department which grew to over 340,000 during the Boston Marathon Bombing crisis.

The Worcester Police Department also has more 11,000 Facebook LIKES. Combined Worcester Police Department top 17,000 but as a percentage of their communities population, Barre leads Central MA. With a population of just 5,400, the town has tapped social media gold with 1,716 Facebook LIKES and 825 Twitter followers.

In Central Massachusetts, the social media adoption of police departments has little relationship with the size or how urban the city of town is. The use of social media seems to be more philosophical and resource driven.

Holden Not Social

Detective Sergeant Chris Cary with the Holden Police Department told GoLocal, "We don't use any social media right now, but we've been talking about Facebook. We do use e-mail for emergency and updates. Once we use social media, we'll probably have a couple people have access to the accounts, for controls purposes. Again, we're still in the process of looking into it.

Presently, Holden Police have neither a Facebook or a Twitter account.

Milford's Police Are Building

Deputy Chief James Heron with the Milford Police Department said, "Going back 20 years, when we first started with just a website to get info out, they were very difficult, not user friendly.. You had to hire a guy that cost $15K to manage it, and all kinds of website quality.

Social media made it simpler and easier. The idea was the same -- people like info from us. FB and Twitter make it quick to get updates out road blockages, construction, alerts, that type of thing.

We've got a tip line. Milford Patch is a big help -- they get the word out there along with us. We re-tweet Milford Patch stuff. They read the log and post the daily log. It's mostly me who does the updates, but the Chief has access.

We started less than a year ago...now we've got 1800 likes...700 followers on Twitter. People respond, ask questions, if something big happens we'll post it.

There's been a couple of minor issues with wise guys...we'll remove any of those comments. People ask, "How come you don't put the other log, like putting where the cruisers go?" Well, it's time consuming, and we see other departments who use it post it pretty late.

There can be problems

In 2012, Worcester's Police Chief was sanctioned by the City for misusing social media. A GoLocalWorcester report unveiled Chief Gary Gemme's social media miscue. As GoLocalWorcester reported, "Worcester Police Chief Gary Gemme violated the city's social media policy Friday morning when he took to Twitter to level a personal attack on GoLocalWorcester.com."

The story went on to report, that "Councilor (Konnie) Lukes addressed Gemme’s behavior on twitter. Councilor Lukes said at a Council meeting, “I asked him not to engage in sophomoric behavior and he said nothing.”

Worcester Police Department refused to return calls on this story. After the controversy, Chief Gemme shutdown his Twitter account and it has been inactive since.