Reality TV the new frontline for police
September 8, 2011 by admin
Filed under Latest Lingerie News
On the NSW Police Force’s active Facebook page, the posting that has attracted the most ”likes” in recent weeks – 1107 so far – is a picture of Grace the police dog and her seven puppies. More than 140 felt compelled to leave comments, few of which added more to the sum of human knowledge than this one: ”nawwww so cute”.
A ”puppy cam” was set up to show the septuplets’ fans what they were doing, which was not much most of the time.
By contrast, in surrounding posts, five people saw fit to ”like” a post calling for information about the death of a pedestrian at Emu Plains – presumably, liking the fact of the investigation rather than the death.
Nine people liked the call for witnesses to a bus driver bashing at Maroubra. Two people liked police praising good behaviour at the Moon Festival in Cabramatta. Conclusion? Good behaviour is duller than bad but puppies beat all-comers.
Social media is presenting a double-edged advance for law enforcement. While the recent BlackBerry Messenger-assisted riots in England starkly illustrated the problem posed by new forms of communication, they also demonstrated the opportunities for collecting information and talking to citizens – in other words, bypassing traditional media and telling its story directly.
The director of public affairs for the NSW Police Force, Strath Gordon, says it is examining the lessons from England for police but mainly in trying to give people information and bust myths. The experience north of the Tweed earlier this year was also instructive.
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Many people went to social media for answers during the Queensland floods.
”They moved in the circles [in which] they were already active,” Gordon says.
For Queensland police, Facebook and Twitter became a form of disaster management, and Gordon says they offer police a powerful way to communicate ”effectively, and cost effectively”.
Social media was becoming more important in emergency management but also in more routine crime. The police launched a Neighbourhood Watch foray into Facebook last month with a pilot ”Eyewatch” project in 10 places around the state.
After reclaiming its Twitter name, @nswpolice, from a marketing company in 2009, it now uses it to appeal for information about crime and to tell people outside mainstream media about developments in its investigations.
When a man was arrested in the US over the Madeleine Pulver case, the press conference was streamed live and linked from Twitter, Facebook and its website. It had a YouTube channel, film crews and photographers.
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Direct communication is not replacing the traditional media for police, Gordon says, but it is helpful. ”We can bypass media to talk directly to people, but we will always need to talk to the media,” he says.
On Twitter this week, NSW Police referred to another of its communication strategies, reality TV. The effectiveness of co-operating with TV programs is being reviewed by a University of NSW survey as part of a project called Cops on the Box. (On Facebook, 51 people liked the same request). The research aims to assess the impact of programs like The Force, RBT, The Recruits, Crash InvestigationUnit and Missing Persons Unit and ”what messages are conveyed” by them.
The survey asks how people’s concern about crime changes after watching the programs, whether they changed viewers’ behaviour or their assessment of police, and whether they represented everyday police activities.
Police co-operation does not appear to be about money. Documents released in 2009 to The Daily Telegraph under freedom of information laws showed that the NSW Police Force received $692,397 in revenue during the 2007-08 financial year from TV producers. Yet in the context of its $2.8 billion budget any money it does receive is small and pales in comparison with the PR such co-operation generates.
Gordon says reality TV is a critical part of a wider strategy to buttress public confidence in policing and the willingness to report crime. ”It’s not about feelgood PR in that sense. There’s a strong public desire to see police doing their job,” he says.
Focus group research has shown people like to see police on the street and being a calming influence. Gordon says the possibility of a perverse effect – increasing concern about crime by showing crime on television, even if police are demonstrated to be fighting it – was not borne out.
Yet a warning comes from Professor David Dixon, dean of law at the University of NSW and an expert in policing, who says: ”It might make people feel safer … but that’s having already raised their concerns about crime.”
Dixon says the fear of crime is generally overstated and overall crime rates have been dropping for some time, and reality TV shows can be good for the business of policing.
