Police Reform Can Start On Twitter

Stories by Susan Crawford on Medium 2017-06-22

To build trust in their communities, typically tight-lipped NYPD officers learned to open up on social media.

(Anna Bryukhanova / istockphoto)

In January of 2014, three weeks after Bill de Blasio was sworn in as New York City Mayor, NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton sent his first tweet. Bratton had just finished updating his staff about CompStat, a system he’d launched years before to follow crime spikes and allow police leaders to direct their resources accordingly. He wrote:

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Enjoyed addressing command staff at #Compstat this a.m. We invented it in '94, glad to see how far it has come.

— @CommissBratton

The action might seem slight, but inside the NYPD the tweet had significant impact. In the past, police were expected to refrain from sharing information with the public. “We were all born and raised to be rather tight lipped when it came to distributing public information,” Sergeant Paul Grattan, Jr. of the Transit Bureau told me. Instead of communicating directly to constituents, officers were expected to “channel things through public information offers,” the single entity authorized to approve statements and speak on behalf of the department.

From July 2015 through August 2016, I interviewed dozens of NYPD leaders and employees, many anonymously, in an attempt to fully document the department’s adoption of Twitter and other online platforms. (The full case study was published by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.) This adoption was a transformative move for the department and an attempt to balance crime prevention and community outreach — an effort, as Bratton said, to shift the police mindset from “warrior” to guardian.

Bratton embraced the potential of social media platforms at a time when many police departments viewed transparency as a threat. He hoped that use of social media as a communications channel would both help officers and citizens trust each other more and provide individual officers with a sense of autonomy within the Department’s large bureaucracy. He hoped for secondary benefits as well: that stronger communications would foster a more positive public perception of the police, improving daily interactions and encouraging citizens to participate more actively in preventing crimes.

For years, the Deputy Commissioner of Public Information was the sole voice of the NYPD. As Deputy Inspector Thomas Conforti put it, “Twitter made it possible for us to push out information which was specific and real-time directly to the public. And, more importantly, to reporters, without having to obtain prior authorization.” It was a radical transformation for a traditionally top-down organization — one that was unimaginable before Bratton’s tenure.

Within three months, the department had launched five precinct-level Twitter accounts, and by the end of 2014, all 77 NYPD commands and 9 housing bureaus were communicating with the public via Twitter. Not all officers took to the shift; some had a sense that they were being pushed into a new world prematurely. One chief told me, “I remember, personally, [before Bratton came in] I was so against tweeting. I’m telling you the truth, I thought it was a teenage thing to do.” Fundamentally, it was “against the culture of what we had been used to,” a senior officer explained: “we came up as babies in this” tight-lipped culture.

Years of training and discipline had taught officers to keep their mouths shut when it came to the public. Moreover, social media offered innumerable opportunities for mistakes. Police were especially worried that a small issue could balloon once it hit the public sphere. There was a sense that the public and the media in particular were alert to any opportunity to criticize the police.

That confidence was soon tested. On April 22, 2014, the @NYPDNews account tweeted a request: “Do you have a photo with a member of the NYPD? Tweet us & tag it #myNYPD.” By midnight the same day, according to the New York Daily News, “more than 70,000 people had posted comments on Twitter decrying police brutality, slamming the NYPD for the social media disaster and recalling the names of people shot to death by police.” NYPD personnel held their collective breath: Would someone be fired for this?

Deputy Commissioner of Strategic Initiatives Zach Tumin called Bratton’s reaction to the fiasco a “bellwether for the department.” “In one of the [press] gaggles [afterwards], Bratton took out his own smartphone and turned it on the gaggle of reporters with a camera towards them and said, ‘Smile!,’ and he took a picture. We posted it up,” Tumin recalled. Bratton also remarked — in public but with a nonchalant tone — that the NYPD was on a steep learning curve. The news cycle moved on. No one was fired or reprimanded.

As a senior officer explained to me, they quickly learned to adjust: “You jump into the pool…the water’s cold. After a couple of seconds, it’s the same cold water, but you’re warm now.”

The move to Twitter was coupled with a rethinking of community engagement. Under past administrations, the “community relations” function of the NYPD focused on going to locations in the precinct that had chronic problems and hearing feedback from community meetings. These community meetings, however, were attended by a small group of people.

In 2015, precincts were re-divided: between three and five sectors were drawn along neighborhood boundaries. Within each of these new neighborhood sectors, Captain Timothy Malin explained to me, two Neighborhood Coordinating Officers were assigned to “learn that area and take ownership of it.” This included spending 20 percent of their time “off radio.” Instead of responding to 911 calls, officers would stick to an assigned sector and talk, informally, with citizens. The program created, for the first time, a true “geographic responsibility” for officers. (The Neighborhood Coordinating Officers program is now being expanded to many more precincts.)

Of course, in an emergency, social media can provide a tool for quickly and widely sharing information. As Sergeant Grattan explained, “if something critical happens [affecting the transit system], people would already be tuning into the chief of transit’s account” and would be immediately notified of how to respond. In many cases, the public can serve as extended eyes and ears for the NYPD in their effort to apprehend criminals. The NYPD has long made use of Crime Stoppers, a call-in number for reporting information about crimes or suspects. Today, the NYPD uses Twitter to inform the public of recent criminal activity and to disseminate images or details that could help the public identify a subject.

If the NYPD wanted to connect more deeply with citizens, they needed a platform to facilitate engagement — giving them a voice in community issues while maintaining a citizen’s anonymity. Deputy Commissioner Tumin decided to use a platform called IdeaScale, with which residents could tell a precinct commander about issues the police needed to solve — a persistent parking problem, a safety issue, a noise complaint — and other community members could decide whether to prioritize those issues by voting them up. It would be the responsibility of a designated sergeant to resolve those issues and report back to the community.

The NYPD learned a great deal from the pilot. But despite on-the-ground marketing, the platform never attracted enough community members to make it truly useful. Now, the department is evaluating Facebook for many of these functions. As Malin puts it, “You have to go where the users are.”

In a city of eight million residents, the NYPD’s online presence seems to be reaching fewer than 800,000—or around 10 percent. As one officer explained, “We still struggle with the general public awareness of the fact that they can tune into online.” To date, the department makes limited use of two-way communication. As one senior officer explained “we did a great job at communicating at the public, but we’d never, in my opinion, done an effective job of communication with the public.”

It is difficult to claim that Bratton’s technology initiatives, taken in isolation, have had a major impact. Indeed, it is likely that most New Yorkers haven’t noticed what the NYPD has been up to. The NYPD’s Twitter followers are low, in the hundreds or thousands per precinct. NYPD precinct commanders have used Twitter mostly as a broadcast engine for good news, rather than a two-way channel of communications.

Nonetheless, it’s difficult to overstate just how fundamental a change these primitive social media steps represent with respect to NYPD culture. The idea of an individual precinct commander tweeting, without approval from centralized leadership, would have been impossible to imagine just a few years ago.

Under prior administrations, the social media policy was, essentially: “don’t.” Bratton’s policy was: “do and we’ll figure it out later.” Bratton believed technology would help “close the trust gap.” Not immediately, but in the longer term, perhaps 20 years from now.

New Yorkers are now safer in the city than they have been in years. Yet tensions between police officers and the communities in which they work have continued to mount in other cities across the country. Just this past summer, racial violence erupted in Milwaukee and Baton Rouge in response to the fatal shootings of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling. In New York, protestors also took to the streets after an off-duty officer fatally shot Delrawn Small.

The challenge facing the NYPD today is to maintain safe streets while ushering in a new era of mutual respect between officers and local communities. At this early stage of digital technology adoption, the NYPD’s attempt to change the culture of policing by enriching communications between police and neighborhoods holds lessons for public agencies across the US during a period of intense volatility.

This column is drawn from “Culture Change and Digital Technology: The NYPD under Commissioner William Bratton, 2014–2016,” available here.

Police Reform Can Start On Twitter was originally published in Backchannel on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.