This story, found at Police1.com, describes a program to equip more than 2000 officers in Baltimore with Blackberry Smartphones. The phones will be equipped with an application for police work – searching databases, locating officers, and more. Several things are intriguing about this article:

1) Every officer will have the opportunity to be a social media public information officer. Some percentage of officers are already Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, MySpace, and Twitter users. Will officers receive training on social media creation and distribution using their department provided Smartphones? Will the department have a social media policy in place at the time of distribution?

2) Some officers are complaining about the program on the departments official Facebook page. It is good that thedepartment has a Facebook page. I wonder if they anticipated that employees would a) use the Facebook page to complain about new programs and b) journalists would use Facebook user comments as quotable source material for articles?

How would you encourage officers to use their new Blackberries for Social Media creation that would improve safety and lower crime in Baltimore?

About the author

Greg Friese wrote 58 articles on this blog.

Greg Friese, MS, NREMT-P is an author, podcaster, blogger, and advocate for emergency response agencies to use social media before, during, and after any incident. Greg is the Director of Education for CentreLearn Solutions, LLC. He is also the co-host of the EMSEduCast podcast and is a paramedic for a 911 agency in northeast Wisconsin

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