Be Open and Look for Stories to Tell

As a public information officer, we are used to telling the public about incidents that have occurred. The arrest or crime which occurred is what’s typically shared with the public. As the public information officer, we must report as well as the obligation to meet the state’s Freedom of Information Act requirements. We are also fiercely protective of our agencies when the news media inquiries. The Society of Professional Journalists released a study that stated public information officers are a problem for journalists. Specifically, they have stated that this “Censorship by PIO” works in tandem with other assaults on free speech including restrictions on public records, threats, and physical assaults on reporters, prosecution of whistleblowers, and threats of prosecution against reporters. This statement is simply a byproduct of public information officer’s doing their job, as it evolved over the last twenty-five years.

Over the last twenty-five years, public information officers in law enforcement agencies have grown exponentially. At first, the public information officer was undoubtedly a sworn member of the

agency, who had been assigned the position by the head of their agency. Most may not have taken the position if they had a detailed understanding of what the position required. In the earlier years, I suspect that the public information officer was a fierce defender of their respective agencies. The media could not be trusted. The relationship between the media and the public information officer was strained if not antagonistic at best.

Over time, those in the role of public information officer received training, learning the value of working with the new media, and began to develop working relationships with individual journalists. Law enforcement agencies across the country began to see the value of the public information officer, embracing them inside the leadership circle to be at the table to discuss a course of action when releasing information. The largest law enforcement agencies in the nation created public information officer positions with leadership roles, such as the Deputy Chief of Public Information at the New York Police Department. In 2004, the Boston Police Department moved a 30-year police veteran to be the Director of Media Relations and placed a veteran Boston Herald reporter to the position of Director of Communications. This was viewed as a step to “define the image with both the public and the police.” Steps in this direction swept across the countries larger law enforcement agencies rather quickly as the obvious benefits were observed.

The largest agencies created entire media relations divisions, training staff in districts, precincts and bureaus across their jurisdictions. As social media began sweeping the nation, law enforcement agencies began embracing the new medium quickly identifying its value in communicating directly to the public. In some cases, side-stepping the news media, and breaking stories themselves. This

was never more obvious than in the Boston Marathon Bombing. Social media used by the Boston

Police Department to put-out surveillance images that quickly helped identify the Tsarnaev brothers. Boston Police did not have to wait for the news media, they put the information out via their social media platforms, which were extremely robust for that time.

What was rapidly learned by law enforcement agencies across the country is how valuable social media is to law enforcement's ability to directly connect with their community. Through the last ten years, there have been countless activities that have generated positive will, and connection to the community. Some of those activities included #ALSchallenge, #lipsychallenge, which allowed law enforcement to connect with the community on a level that they could never achieve with the regular news media, but over the last few years, many of us have become stagnated.

We seemed to have been satisfied to just have social media, and to only put things out when needed. Social media moves at a mind-boggling pace. The social influencer Eric Qualman, @equalman, who puts out annually a video on the impact of social media on the world, states on average the attention span of a person has been reduced to a mere seven seconds. That is seven seconds to catch a person’s attention from your agency, so you can connect to them.

Now I understand that there are heads of agencies as well as other leadership members who say, “So, What?”.  But as a public information officer, we need to realize that we are competing with advertising firms, businesses, and other organizations that are marketing themselves to the public. We in law enforcement need to realize we have to do the same. We need to market our organizations to the public.

Larger law enforcement organizations may have a media car on the street during all or most shifts. Their job is to respond to calls, not necessarily crimes of great media interest, but perhaps to calls in which an officer has a high likelihood of doing some act of great community interest. In other organizations, they solicit staff for information about events, activities, and stories which mild hold public interest. Those stories might require some planning, equipment, as well as editing once it was recorded. Those stories you tell are the ones that build public trust, engage your community, and will assist your organizations later in weathering a storm brought on by a controversial issue.  

To find these stories, the public information officer must have a connection to the line supervisors and officers, or if they have staff assisting them, they should have that staff checking with the line supervisors, and officers regularly. By doing so, the staff will eventually come to you with an idea. They will be pitching a story idea to you!

Human interest stories are always compelling stories, imagine if you were to try to pitch a story

to the news media about a human-interest story involving your department. They may take it, maybe they have other stories in the works, but there is no guarantee that they will take the idea you are pitching.

But if you do not have to rely on the news media to publish your story. You can create your story, do the interviews, edit the video, format it properly, and then uploads it to your video to your social media accounts. Once that happens you can promote it across all your platforms, breaking your story, pushing it out multiple ways, at different time frames, increasing your exposure far more than one or two-cycle news story. So, search for your stories, tell your stories and break your stories.

Look for the next week's topic: Strategic Communications Plans and how to make them work for your agency