Note
Caption title.
"March 2014"--Page 1.
"This is one in a series of papers that will be published as a result of Harvard’s Executive Session on Policing and Public Safety. In the early 1980s, an Executive Session on Policing helped resolve many law enforcement issues of the day. It produced a number of papers and concepts that revolutionized policing. Thirty years later, law enforcement has changed and NIJ and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government are again collaborating to help resolve law enforcement issues of the day."--Page 1.
"NCJ 244760"--Page [4]
Summary
"The Boston Police Department (BPD) has long embraced both community policing and the use of social media. The department put its experience to good and highly visible use in April 2013 during the dramatic, rapidly developing investigation that followed the deadly explosion of two bombs at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. BPD successfully used Twitter to keep the public informed about the status of the investigation, to calm nerves and request assistance, to correct mistaken information reported by the press, and to ask for public restraint in the tweeting of information from police scanners. In the aftermath of the investigation, BPD was “applauded for leading an honest conversation with the public during a time of crisis in a way that no police department has done before.” In crit ical ways, BPD’s successful use of social media during the marathon bombing investigation relied on previous trust building by the department — including a longstanding, if more mundane, use of social media. This paper discusses the lessons to be learned from BPD’s use of social media during the marathon bombing investigation and earlier. However, it is not strictly or even primarily a case study. It is an effort to contribute to a broader, ongoing discussion about police and social media. It is a reflection, in light of Boston’s experience, on the opportunities and challenges that social media present to the police and on the ways in which social media can help develop new models of policing that are adapted to our 21st-century world but rooted in traditions of community engagement stretching back through the community policing movement to Robert Peel’s 19th-century goals for a modern constabulary."--Pages 1-2.