Edmonton police update community with social media

By Shaamini Yogaretnam

EDMONTON — The Edmonton Police Service has launched a weekly Community Crime Update online video to inform the public of trends in crime and to help prevent further crimes in neighbourhoods across the city.

This week’s Community Crime Update video details the city’s larger Violence Reduction Strategy, which was launched by Chief Rod Knecht in August. It includes nine programs under three plans:

• Prevention
• Intervention
• Suppression

The weekly videos themselves focus on four areas of concern for EPS:

• Alcohol and drugs
• Weapons
• Distressed communities
• Social disorder

Viewers of the videos will find that each deals with a specific part of one of the four main areas of concern, but these areas aren’t easily separable when looking at crime in Edmonton.

“They’re all tied,” said Sgt. James Elkow who appears in the Sept. 22 video and discusses social disorder on Stony Plain Road.

“I would list them all as an equal priority, because from each derives the other.”

Deterring crime or informing the public?

What’s interesting about the Community Crime Updates is the level of participation and engagement that community residents have in affecting the prevention plan. Rather than focus solely on deterring future criminal activity or on suppressing current crime, the Community Crime Updates aim to help Edmontonians be informed so they can take precautions to prevent crime.

“The bad guys aren’t watching it,” Elkow said.

“Let’s just be realistic. All we can do is try to protect those in our neighbourhoods by having them watch it and protect themselves by taking the direction that we tell them about.”

This direction may include advocating the use of timer lights in residential areas with high theft rates, or suggesting that residents don’t leave bottles on their porches overnight.

Elkow stresses that the updates may not deter crime on the part of someone who wants to go ahead and do something illegal, but the updates will enable citizens to prevent crimes from being committed against themselves.

“That’s where it starts – self-protection. Then it stems from there,” Elkow said. “It’s being vigilant in the neighbourhood.”

The videos feature information collected by EPS analysts on community crime that is then explained by EPS police officers who detail the patterns they encounter on their individual beats throughout the city. The videos are also entirely locally produced by the EPS communications staff, and are shared with the city on social media channels, which work best with community engagement and feedback.

EPS and social media

EPS has a Facebook page as a government organization with more than 1,200 likes. Its Twitter feed is followed by over 2,500 people. The EPS YouTube account has nearly 100 subscribers, with each Community Crime Update video averaging hundreds of views.

It may seem like an unlikely strategy for a police service to employ, but social media is an excellent community tool, said Michael James, digital supervisor with EPS.

“Social media has become one of the things that we all need to be a part of in order to get our messages out,” James said.

“It’s a great way to get messages directly into our community’s hands so we aren’t relying on other sources of communication to get right down to the person level.”

Social media allows the user to access the information he or she is looking for without having to rely on a mainstream news outlet to act as the middleman.

The police service’s many social media channels and the opportunities for feedback through commenting, posting, retweeting or liking information will help EPS both deter crime and educate the community, said James.

“For the most part, the effect is going to be information.”

The open lines of social media communication might encourage those who haven’t reported crimes in the past or didn’t connect previous crimes with what else is happening in their community to now report them to police.

“We do need to know that your garage has been broken into because we look for trends,” James said. These trends will then inform the police response in that community.

Problems with online reporting

James is quick to point out that while social media certainly has its place in the spread of information, EPS is still heavily relying on the telephone system for reporting crimes.

“If somebody posts a crime to Twitter, will we be able to get back to that person in a timely manner? We’re not set up for reporting crime on social media.”

He does say that in the near future Edmontonians can look forward to being able to report non-emergency crimes online through the EPS website. This will cut down on the amount of time residents spend waiting at local police stations. No specific date is available for the launch of this program.

“We’re looking into it and investigating these things,” James said.

The Community Crime Updates will be available every Thursday on the EPS website and will, of course, be linked to on EPS’s social media channels.