Controlling the rumours. Interview with Neil Tipton of West Mercia Police.

August 30, 2011

I had a chat with Neil Tipton, Web Development Officer at West Mercia Police, on 24 Aug 2011. I was particularly interested in the process behind the force’s escalation on social media and the learning from it. This is an edited version of what he told me.

Background

West Mercia is the constabulary serving the counties of Herefordshire, Shropshire (and Telford and Wrekin), and Worcestershire.
We make extensive use of Facebook as part of our regular campaigns. We’ve been using the platform for two years. Since May 2010 we have also had a corporate Twitter account, largely publishing news releases. We make some use of YouTube and have accounts on other social networks largely to protect our username.
We had explicitly planned to use our corporate Twitter account for real time public communication in major incidents as well as day-to-day interaction. We had also explicitly planned to use social media for rumour control around major incidents.

We do not yet have officially sanctioned local social media accounts (for neighbourhood policing teams for example) but this is something we are actively exploring for future implementation.

Trigger and escalation
We had an operational plan in place for policing a march by the English Defence League and opposition groups in the Shropshire/Telford town of Wellington. As part of this plan comms staff were to be mobilised to monitor social media networks to challenge rumours and provide an authoritative voice.

We were obviously monitoring the disorder in London and other parts of the country. Even so the Monday was a normal working day. North Worcestershire is in our area and borders the West Midlands so when incidents were reported in Birmingham that seemed closer to home. That evening I was at home looking at how other forces were using social media. At 2300hrs we received the first question direct to the force twitter account asking us for information on rumours of a riot in our area.
There were not then, nor at any point during the following few days, any incidents of significant disorder across West Mercia. We had very isolated examples of criminal damage and trouble but nothing out of the normal run of policing.

I called the control room, they were receiving high volumes of calls from residents worried that riots might be spreading to our towns and cities. I began tweeting from home, controlling rumours. Social media activity died down again by 0100hrs.

On Tuesday the force started Operation Denver to reassure our communities and keep West Mercia calm. As part of that we started a nearly 24/7 shift pattern for the comms team so there was always one person on duty handling social media.

We monitored Twitter and Facebook and corrected misinformation. We sent public @ messages to individual users if they were repeating rumours and answered questions presented to us. We thought that tone was important. We tried to be friendly and authoritative. We were occasionally lighthearted: I added an #unfamiliarkeyboardfail hashtag at one point. But we were ready to modify that tone if the situation had deteriorated.

At its peak, we were dealing with questions and comments directed at us at a rate of one every 10 seconds and keeping track of whether we had replied and when was a challenge. Hootsuite was a very useful tool to help us to collaborate and check who had done what.

As the week progressed it became clearer that no incidents of disorder were happening within West Mercia and the situation began to calm. Our biggest challenge became finding new ways to say “nothing is happening, the situation is calm”.

On the Saturday we had to police a static demonstration by the English Defence League and other opposition groups in Wellington (the Home Secretary having banned marches). This involved a co-ordinated effort between comms staff for the police and also Telford & Wrekin Council . As well as managing the traditional media, a large part of our communications activites were again focused on social media, where we worked hard to provide timely updates based on fact not conjecture.

One of the challenges in fluid situations like these is that you can state a fact, correctly – such as there are no incidents, everything is calm – but five minutes later something may be happening that contradicts this. However, we tried to be clear and prompt to keep people informed of what was happening and when and always correct or update statements as the known facts emerged.

We went from 2,000 twitter followers to 4,500 in a few days. The force website received a months worth of traffic in just one week.

Learning points

It was fun to move from what might sometimes be considered a back office role to the front line and nice to have a feel of direct relevance. We had a lot of positive feedback from the public about our use of social media including someone who said that we had “Really changed my perception of the police”.

The force had always acknowledged the importance of social media but now that officers have seen it in a real environment they really understand its relevance. Social media impacts on how these events unfold. Our Chief Constable David Shaw has been very clear that social networking is now a permanent feature both of our thinking and our response to major events and incidents from now on.

The challenge for us is to sustain the momentum. We want to keep our followers and continue to explore the engagement opportunities this affords us. Encouragingly, we haven’t had lots of people turning off our Facebook updates from their newsstream or choosing to stop following us on Twitter in the days since the protests and national disorder.

Message to other category one responders
Don’t underestimate the volume of messages you will need to handle, or the staffing implications this may bring

Tone is really important.

You need to have systems to allow you to handle social media work between several members of staff, particularly for Twitter, where the standard interface is difficult to work with.

Neil tweets as @neiltipton and he has written up his recent experiences for the Guardian

You can find West Mercia Police on twitter @wmerciapolice and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/westmerciapolice

“A game changer for policing.” Interview with Amanda Coleman from Greater Manchester Police.

August 26, 2011

Amanda tweets as @amandacomms.

I did some very quick analysis of GMP’s twitter as part of this blog post.

A tale of four police twitter accounts

August 22, 2011

Background
The recent riots and incidents of violent disorder in London and other cities will have far-reaching consequences for public policy, policing tactics and many other areas of life. Big shifts will occur.

I want to focus in on one, quite small, area of change: the deployment of social media in an emergency. As a first step I have looked at some statistics on the twitter accounts of four police forces. There are many caveats to this work and I really don’t want to be seen to be drawing conclusions, just raising interesting observations.

Of course if someone wants to pay me to do a more serious piece of work on this, they have only to contact me.

I’ve looked at the corporate twitter accounts of The Metropolitan Police, West Midlands Police, Greater Manchester Police and West Mercia Police. The first three police forces had to deal with serious incidents of disorder the last one did not. I used the service twittercounter to generate statistics for the number of followers per day and the number of tweets per day between 5th and 14th August inclusive.

Quick reminder of some key dates

• 4th August: Mark Duggan shot dead by police
• 6th August: Large protest at Tottenham Police Station followed by riots in Tottenham.
• 7th August: Riots in several parts of London
• 8th August: Riots in several parts of London, Bristol and in Nottingham
• 9th August: Riots in London, Greater Manchester, West Midlands, Merseyside continue into the morning of 10th August
• 11th August: Situation seems to calm

Metropolitan Police

Orange rhombus followers, blue blobs tweets.

The least active of the twitter accounts I looked at. In fact, as I wrote here, the twitter account made no reference to the disorder until Sunday lunchtime. Followers grew rapidly between 9th August and 11th August and more steadily to 14th August. Followers grew from roughly 27,500 followers to 40,000 by 14th August. Tweet volumes peaked on 9th August when just under 30 tweets were sent.

The account was used to broadcast information about the police position, the number of arrests and to share statements from senior officers.
There were a few dynamic updates of police actions as they happened most notably on 9th August.

“We are responding to disorder in Ealing, Clapham and Peckham. Lewisham appears to be calming down at present.”

“Rumours of violence against mosques in Ilford and Tower Hamlets are untrue. We have had no reported violence against any mosques.”

Were retweeted by over 100 people (according to twitter’s internal system).
The Met Police account didn’t engage in public with individuals (ie there were no @ messages in the timeline)

West Midlands Police

Orange rhombus followers, blue blobs tweets.

A quiet corporate account under normal circumstances the number of tweets spiked sharply on the 9th and remained at a high level for the next three days. Follower numbers also jumped between 8th and 9th and then increased up until the 12th (to stand at a little under 25,000.

This account was also used to broadcast information about the police position etc.
On the 10th the corporate account encouraged people to follow more locally-focused accounts. And retweeted this from South Birmingham Police

“At the Test Match? Fantastic event for Brum, we’re delighted to host the fixture. This event will not be overshadowed by mindless thugs.”

The account virtually never engaged with individuals in public. The bio on the account profile indicates that they won’t.

Greater Manchester Police

Orange rhombus followers, blue blobs tweets.

Tweets from this account leaped up between 10th and 11th August in response to the disorder in Manchester. Follower numbers had increased significantly in advance of this (from around 45,000 on 5th August to around 70,000 on 10th August. They jumped again between 10th and 11th August finally peaking at just under 100,000 followers. By far the most followed of the accounts I looked at.

This account was very different in tone and application. It was much less formal. There was widespread engagement with individuals in the public stream. The account provided live updates on the policing situation even though it was dynamic and kept changing. The huge increase in activity was post riots when the police began to tweet details of those charged (and convicted) of offences related to the disorder. This was controversial and the account engaged with individuals over this in the stream:

@bmckee15 we publish people’s DOBs so that there can be no mis-identification with someone of the same name

Lot of debate about publishing details – courts very clear, justice should be done publicly

On the 13th the account started to invite feedback and provided a commentary on this

“really appreciate constructive comments about consistency of tone etc as we have different tweeters. We will definitely look at this.”

West Mercia Police

Orange rhombus followers, blue blobs tweets.

West Mercia covers a large, fairly rural area (including the area I live in) and a large number of communities who border Birmingham (in North Worcestershire). West Mercia used their account to spread calm and to reassure their citizens. Tweets ramped up from a low of around 10 on 7th August to a peak of 80 on 10th August. Follower numbers saw their biggest jump between 9th and 10th August (from 2,000 to just over 4,000). Follower numbers then grew again to reach around 5,500 by 14th August.

West Mercia had a much easier job, keeping calm and trying to control rumours. The account was handled in a similar way to Greater Manchester, reasonably informal in tone and engaging with individuals in public.

On the 10th persistent rumours circulated that riots were coming to Shrewsbury.

“Again, it appears the #Shrewsbury rumour mill is going into overdrive! We have no incidents to report that would suggest rumours are true.”

An impending EDL March was also causing concern (the March was eventually banned by the Home Secretary and a static protest occurred instead).

“@graemem12 Police will be present in the Wellington and Oakengates area in preparation for any anticipated protests.http://ow.ly/620aE”

“Final tweet of the night – all remains calm across West Mercia. Thanks for your messages and support. We’ll continue to update you tomorrow.”

What does this tell us?
Well I’m wary to draw too many conclusions. I really think we could benefit from a much more comprehensive review of the use of social media across this time period. Many other social media accounts from other cat one responders and from local agencies were active and ultimately we need to be able to assess the outcomes against the actions.

We can see that there is an appetite for receiving information via this channel. In every case twitter follower numbers increased sharply across this time period.

My personal view is that the more informal and engaged approach of Greater Manchester and West Mercia should be the preferred mode. This clearly has resource and training implications. Not just for the staff actually operating the twitter accounts but for the incident commanders who need to understand the way this virtual and ephemeral world interacts with the very real physical world that they are concerned with.

Here I asked if we need new doctrines? I am happy to modify that to stating that we do need new doctrines.

As discussed in the comments here, twitter may be receiving attention from responders to the detriment of other networks such as facebook.

And more than anything we need to learn from this experience.

Walsall fire case study

August 16, 2011

There was a big fire yesterday in the centre of Walsall, in the West Midlands, UK. It seems to have done some serious damage to property but thankfully no-one was seriously hurt by the fire or bringing it under control. It does provide a small case study to examine where we are in terms of social media and emergencies.

The local authority corporate twitter account and the twitter account of a West Midlands Police Sergeant were very active as the incident unfolded.

A few issues leap out of wider interest:

• as you might expect in a fast-moving situation there was some confusion (such as where the Council was evacuating people to). Because it happened in public the Council was able to put matter straight promptly.
• the agencies were active on twitter but I couldn’t find official traffic about the incident on facebook. Walsall folk were talking about the incident there though.
• agencies were updating conventional media on twitter which I think represents a positive development

I’ve used Storify to collate some of the traffic below.

Planner meets public: a guest post

August 15, 2011

This is a slightly unusual post.

The latest edition of “Resilience”, the magazine of the Emergency Planning Society contains a load of useful things. One article jumped out. It was by Lisa Lipscombe, Emergency Planning Officer at Uttlesford District Council. I thought it deserved a wider readership so I emailed her. My attempts to encourage her to start blogging herself were unsuccessful but she was happy for me to post the article here. The photos are scenes from Uttlesford (credits at the end) Read more

Working with Helpful Technology to exercise social media plans

August 15, 2011

It does matter who is in charge in an emergency

August 12, 2011

The Guardian reports that the Police and the government are in open disagreement.

Q In a major civil emergency in the United Kingdom who is in charge?

A No-one. That is to say no single person, emergencies are handled by an interlocking network of committees.

People are often surprised to discover that, in the UK, we don’t have a strong command and control structure. Politicians not least amongst them. It may seem, at first glance, a slightly dusty and old-fashioned way of doing business but it brings enormous strengths.

In the frontline are a set of public bodies called “category one responders”. These are the people with blue lights on their vehicles, local authorities, bits of the health service and a few stragglers like the Environment Agency and Highways Agency. They have a set of duties defined in various laws and they have to carry out these duties even in an emergency: the police enforce the law and maintain order, fire services rescue people and put out fires, local authorities look after people and clear up after the events and so on.

So the framework is pretty clear, if there is civil unrest it is the job of the Chief Constable (or Commissioner in London) of the area to sort it out. If extra resources are needed then these are deployed from other police forces there is a structure for this but ultimately it boils down to one top cop has to ask for help and others have to agree to help them. At a local level the police can’t tell the fire service which fires to put out or which people to rescue. Instead they share information with them, co-operate and agree common aims.

It’s a flexible, dynamic and robust system. It relies heavily on the professionalism of  a huge range of people within the public services and it requires regular training, exercising and review. Ultimately it leads to clarity, it means that you don’t have a local authority chief executive giving tasking instructions to police public order units. They wouldn’t. They aren’t trained for it. And in the same way the Met Commissioner knows nothing about looking after people made homeless by an emergency. He’s not trained for it.

And what of the fearsomely named COBR (Cabinet Office Briefing Room)? We have become used to the idea that once there is a meeting of COBR things are really serious. COBR’s job is to help the local “cat one responders”. To coordinate central government’s response. To offer support to the people who actually have the job of sorting out the emergency. The Prime Minister may chair COBR but this doesn’t put him in charge of handling the emergency. If the Police ask for help from central government it should be forthcoming. If the Police haven’t asked for water cannon nothing is to be gained from telling people they can use it. Likewise the Home Secretary can’t order a Chief Constable to do anything. This is a very good idea because:

• politicians are not trained for this, public sector workers are
• when COBR is sitting all eyes must be turned towards sorting out the emergency
• politicians worry about politics, that’s their job

We must review the policing tactics before, during and after (let us pray) the unrest. We must look at how well responders worked together. There will be learning, there always is. Maybe there will be criticism. Maybe there will be politically driven changes.

These debates have to happen after the incident. In a calm and collected way.

If you are a political leader, it must be frustrating to find out that you’re not in charge. It must be galling to find that your preferred and politically expedient tactics have been rejected by the people you pay for their skill and expertise in these matters. But when there is an emergency, in the UK, we are all in it together.

It’s the way we do things. We change it at our peril.

Quick post to collate online community responses to the disorder

August 10, 2011

A Wiki has been set up by Crisis Commons to collate data about the riots and the clean up. I’ll add this data there. Let me know of anything else or add the data straight to the wiki

A simple site allows people to add a clean-up. Clean-ups are mapped here .

An Ushahidi instance has been set up to map recovery efforts and reports.

Twitter accounts have been co-ordinating clean-ups in various locations @riotcleanupmanc, @riotcleanup, @riotcleanupwolv, and using the #tag #riotcleanup.

An unofficial website has been set up to crowdsource identification of rioters from photos.

Things to pay attention to: Exercise Watermark

August 8, 2011

Exercise Watermark was one of the largest civil contingency exercise every conducted in the UK. It involved all layers of emergency response in large parts of England and Wales from central government to local communities in “playing” a realistic flooding scenario. The purpose was to test the country’s plans and procedures and to identify areas for further improvement.

The Exercise ran in March 2011

The interim findings were published in June [opens a PDF click here for the source page].

The final findings will be published in September.

I want to highlight a couple of areas.

Working with traditional media.

The report had a team playing the role of media organisations and therefore was able to test how effectively responders worked with conventional media organisations.

There were a number of learning points raised in the draft report and I strongly urge everyone in communications in a Category One Responder to review pages 38 and 39 pretty soon. There were issues of “empowering” press officers and of individual responders not being active in terms of their media relations. I was particularly struck by paragraph 4.57

In LRF areas there were some problems with Police Gold Commanders exacting rigid control over the multi-agency media cell, even to the extent in one area of stopping the Environment Agency issuing such flood warning press releases, until they had passed through the local Gold clearance process, which led to more delay.

Clearly a police Gold Commander hasn’t got the power to stop the Environment Agency issuing press releases but this highlights the need to exercise multi-agency communications arrangements and to train everyone involved in the response.

There are three draft recommendations in this area:

• Draft Recommendation 20 – Press Officer media response training should cover time management and resource issues such as mutual aid so that organisations canexercise and develop mutual aid techniques, ‘like for like press officers’.
• Draft Recommendation 21 – Press officers should be empowered to ensure communication with the media is not delayed by awaiting sign-off from senior management.
• Draft Recommendation 22 – Top Line Briefs from the News Co-ordination Centreshould be briefer and more frequent, while the West Yorkshire LRF releases should be used as a template for future multi-agency releases on flood incidents.

This is before we move on to social media. Where the draft report has much to say (pages 39-42).

Social media.

11 out of the 26 core agencies and government departments did not engage at all with the exercise social media stream. Some agencies who did engage used social media as a broadcast tool, essentially treating it as an extension to conventional media. The report is very positive about the benefits that can flow from effective use of social media and there are these three draft recommendations as a result.

• Draft Recommendation 23 – There should be an audit to assess social media capability, capacity and access within government departments and the emergency responder community. Actions that remove barriers to social media interaction should be considered.
• Draft Recommendation 24 – Government departments and responders should ‘lead the conversation’ and engage with social media.
• Draft Recommendation 25 – To improve consistency, emergency responders need to undertake a basic social media training so they understand the language, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats posed by social media. Training should also cover practical guidance on use of existing internet tools to monitor and respond to comments on Twitter etc.

It was an event of considerable scale and significance. It highlighted many areas where the public should be reassured by the plans and procedures that are in place. That should not prevent responders from overlooking the many and very sensible recommendations for future improvements.

Read more

Three things to check in your emergency plan after this weekend’s disorder

August 8, 2011

For a second night London has seen violent disorder in several locations. The Metropolitan Police has engaged in a significant public order policing effort.

There will be many reviews and there are already many arguments about the causes and triggers of these events. The Police tactics have been criticised. The actions of the Police surrounding the death of a Tottenham man have also been criticised and are the subject of a review by the IPCC.

I want to look at three issues which all emergency managers should be reviewing this morning.

1 How rapidly can you deploy on social media?

There is no doubt that the Met has wised-up to the existence of Social Media. There is no doubt that the scale and speed with which Saturday night’s violence erupted surprised the Police. Had they had intelligence that such disorder was likely, it seems likely that they would have been ready to use their corporate channels as part of a policing plan. But the Tottenham riot took them by surprise. They clearly had to scramble to deploy resources, to seek to get ahead of the incident and to ensure an effective chain of command. The incident was playing out across twitter from Saturday evening. The MetPolice twitter account was silent on the matter until Sunday midday. Since then it’s been a bit more active. This may have been a tactical decision. If so it was the wrong one.

Scrambling onto social media presents a series of problems for many organisations. Practically though, it is the way most bodies are going to deploy social media in emergencies. You need a structured approach. You need to be able to mobilise someone (someones) with appropriate training so that they don’t inflame matters, reveal confidential tactics or otherwise make matters worse. They need sufficient standing with the incident commander that they can provide meaningful advice and suggestions. They need to be available at short notice and have access to the requisite kit, passwords and support documentation.

It’s widely held in emergency planning circles that emergencies always occur on Saturday nights or Sunday mornings. This probably isn’t true. But you really need your plans when they do.

2. Have you trained for third party use of social media?

When I talk to emergency planners about social media (and mobile and related tech) these days they tend to focus on the organisational uses of the technology. “We could have a facebook page” they say “and use it to warn people about incidents”. That’s all very true and you certainly should do that.

There is, until I get going, less of a focus on the impact of social media on the wider community. Riots need several things: they need an underlying feeling of anger, dissatisfaction, resentment. They need a trigger. And they need a bunch of people to join in. Social media has impacts on all those aspects but its most spectacular impact is on the scale and speed at which people can be mobilised. It does look very much as though this was the effect in Tottenham. People used private and public networks to share information about the riots. The pictures of police cars on fire caused most of us to shake our heads and worry about the local community. It seems to have caused some people to think “I’ll have a bit of that”.

We need new plans to handle these new forms of communication. Only a few years ago you could control a bought of disorder if you got enough resources on the ground quickly enough to isolate the instigators then keep enough force around to stop groups from forming. That task has become much more complex because of the ability of crowds to share information over any distance, to actively coordinate or to merely share intelligence, to recruit and plan dynamically. A load of abilities that used to be reserved to the police with their radios, control centres and command structures.

And it’s not just violent disorder. Imagine the impact of social media and related tech on another fuel crisis, a Pandemic Influenza incident, foot and mouth.

Scale and speed. That’s what should become your mantra. Scale and Speed.

3. Are you training for greater openness?

This is a one-way street. The whole world has instant access to news, views and comment from any incident, certainly in the west. 24hr rolling news is the least of it.

The traditional approach of tackle the incident, try to bring things under control and then hold a press conference may not be appropriate in this new world. On the other hand it probably isn’t appropriate to give a minute-by-minute account of operational policing decisions. Somewhere in between those two is the new balance. Next year the balance will shift, and again, and again. It only moves in one direction

Incident commanders work in a goldfish bowl now. How well trained are they for the new world? And how well supported?

In summary

Social media and online tech does not fundamentally change the management of emergencies but it must radically alter the tactics used by responders.

The effects of the new technology need to permeate not just the corporate comms team but all aspects of the planning and decision making process. This is not only about warning and informing its about a fundamental change in the way citizens behave in emergencies. Read more

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