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She was cross

“Our job seems to be to sit in a box and keep out of the way”

she said in an exasperated tone.

Some emergency planners would be quite happy about that. But, in general, elected councillors can play an active and important role in emergency management. Councillors have a role as leaders in their communities both during incidents and, more crucially, in recovery from incidents.

They are elected and accountable. They can represent the interests of their constituents and broker relationships between different organisations and groups. They have a unique role in local emergencies.

Until November.

Because from November they will be joined by directly elected Police and Crime Commissioners (apart from in London where the Mayor already does that sort of job). My guess is that PCCs will want to play some sort of leadership role in emergencies. They may be quite good at that. They may not. Either way there is clearly a risk of conflict with other elected representatives.

And there is a new political dimension in the “Strategic Policing Requirement” which is

a statement of the collective capabilities that police forces across England and Wales will be expected to have in place in order to protect the public from cross-boundary threats such as terrorism, civil emergencies, public disorder and organised crime.

http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/police/police-crime-commissioners/questions/strategic-policing-requirement/

Things apparently going wrong in your emergency?

“We met the Strategic Policing Requirement. Blame the government.”

says Blogshire PCC.

“Oh no they didn’t. Blame the PCC.”

says Home Secretary.

Now I’m really not against having more elected people. Indeed I’m rather in favour of it.

And it should not be beyond the wit of man to deal with the situations I have outlined. And it may not fundamentally change the important issues: keeping people safe and returning to normal.

It could confuse messages, make recovery harder and worry the population.

Or it could build confidence that people who understand you and your priorities can be seen to be engaged in sorting this stuff out.

Or maybe PCCs will just sit in a box and keep out of the way.

Other countries have much longer experience of many more elected officials being involved in emergencies. I wonder if, especially, American colleagues might have some insights.

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Currently the cultural norms around this stuff are evolving and not settled. Is it OK for police officers to search your twitter profile to find out what you have been up to? Is it OK for the dog warden to do the same thing? What about facebook? What about stuff that you only share with your friends or you share in closed groups?

And how to we control the monitoring and use of monitoring data in the online space. The key legislative frameworks that govern how state organisations monitor citizens were written for a very different time.

My particular interest is in major incidents. There we have two challenges, first of all what degree of surveillance is appropriate to protect public safety.

They propose some general principles that could provide a way of thinking about governance of surveillance in this space:

• principle 1: there must be sufficient, sustainable cause
• principle 2: there must be integrity of motive
• principle 3: the methods used must be proportionate and necessary
• principle 4: there must be right authority, validated by external oversight
• principle 5: recourse to secret intelligence must be a last resort if more open sources can be used
• principle 6: there must be reasonable prospect of success

As a way of training tactical and strategic decision makers, especially around emergencies, these principles seem like a good starting point.

Secondly how robust is the data that we can derive from social networks.

I feel the report has overlooked some emerging practice around the latter particularly within the crisis-mapping community. In particular the procedures used within the Standby Taskforce have much to commend them for the effective processing of social media data (though they do rely on being able to throw hundreds of people at the problem). And of course Standby Taskforce is a non-state global actor. The issues of governance do have geographical implications too.

This is an evolving space. In emergency management managers need to be able to understand  and balance the real tension between mining social media to identify live operational intelligence and the risk of false or skewed data. Add to this the fear that vital signals might be hidden in the noise (that comment on a facebook page that says “Help I’m trapped in a destroyed building” vs the thousands of re-tweeting public safety messages. And consider the resource implications.

More research, as they say, is needed.

Overall I think this is a thoughtful and interesting contribution. It doesn’t have all the answers but it does make raise some important points and does frame the argument in helpful ways. Not everyone agrees with my assessment.

UKOSINT “open source intelligence” is a private investigator and trains others in investigation techniques in this space. He was less taken with the report.

I spoke to one of the authors of the report at the BAPCO event a couple of weeks ago. This is what he had to say.

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I also spent a couple of days at the British APCO show and conference with Steph Gray from Helpful Technology. You can see what we got up to here.

British APCO is the British Association of Public Safety Communication Officials. Essentially the people who are interested in making sure that communication never fails in critical situations for the blue-light services. Consequently there were lots of shiny bits of kit and lots of resilient control centre systems. They also organised a panel session on social media and major incidents with a great cast-list. I live-blogged from that session and I’ve been reflecting on many of the things that were shared there.

One of the areas of risk within social media in emergencies, in the UK experience at least, is the different expectations, resources and capacity of different responders. I asked a question about that. Mark Payne who is a Superintendent from West Midlands Police said he felt that Gold and Silver Commanders needed to get a handle on this early on in an incident.

What could this mean. In practical terms?

Well in the Police Service a Silver Commander is the officer with tactical responsibility and Gold the officer with overall and strategic responsibility.

As a first step these people should have on their list of things to check
“who’s keeping online communities informed?” and, presumably,
“who is giving me sensible intelligence derived from online communities”

And of course those people will need to have some data about the incident so they can share it with online communities. The traditional model of decide, implement and hold a press conference is pretty dead now (or should be). The new model of decide, implement and share some of your tactical thinking live with the world is going to take some getting used to.

And there is further mud to cloud the waters.

In civil emergencies the Gold and Silver Commanders are the people who chair (respectively) the strategic and tactical multi-agency groups. At the start of an incident these people are very commonly police officers (though in principle they could work for any service). Once the incident moves into recovery they usually switch to a local authority manager.

Let’s imagine their checklists again:
“who’s keeping online communities informed?” and
“who’s giving me sensible intelligence derived from online communities”

No longer just which member of staff but which member of staff in which agency. And where do they get their data and where do they send their intelligence?

We do have the concept of lead responder. Essentially the principle is that the agency with most work to do will lead on comms. That’s pretty sound: in a river flood event the Environment Agency probably has access to most of the critical data. Lead responders still need to get information out of their partners. The fire and rescue service knows where its pumps are, the local authority knows where the evacuation (rest) centres are.

When we overlay the process for monitoring social media platforms for relevant data it becomes more complex. Many police forces seem to have improved their capacity for intelligence gathering on social media but they often use approaches that are slow to deploy. Even if they deploy effectively how much data will they share with partners and who will be looking for the other relevant data. The police know a lot about crime but a lot less about the safety of contaminated water or what reports of flooding in particular locations tell us about the progress of an incident.

This means much more effective integrated comms than many agencies have been geared up for.

One year ago Exercise Watermark found

“In some LRF areas, members of the police force in a strategic coordinating group, rigidly controlled the media messages. In one area, further delays were caused by key flood warning press releases having to go through the strategic coordinating group clearance process.”

Press officers were also concerned about the location of the multi-agency communications cell, a group of press officers from the concerned response organisations. Access to strategic coordinating group members was essential but Tactical coordination group members would guarantee quicker access to the hard facts and figures. Physical location was also important; the press officer in charge of the Suffolk communications cell said that he had excellent access to strategic coordinating group members, and the Chief Constable was available for media interviews.”

(Page 27 3.113 & 3.114 Exercise Watermark Final Report)

How many areas have reviewed their procedures for managing press releases and journalists in the light of this finding?

We need to get much better at all of this stuff.

The Riots Communities and Victims Panel found (amongst many other useful and challenging things) that

“The riots highlighted how far behind many public services are around the use of widely used modern methods of communication, such as social media.”

(Page 12, After the riots The final report of the Riots Communities and Victims Panel)

So Mark Payne is right.

Are we ready?

I grabbed a couple of minutes with Mark Payne on video just before the event.

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So it’s good to see the responders exercising their flood plans. They ran a rest centre exercise which was neatly covered by the regional TV news.

So far so unspectacular. What I did like was this:

It’s a satellite link providing internet access to the rest centre. For the evacuees. So they can contact the outside world, tell their friends they are OK and behave pretty much as normal.

Should be standard practice in my view. But it isn’t yet.

Good Work Gloucestershire LRF.

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LG Comms links local authority comms managers so I felt like I was amongst friends. My brief was to give them some stuff to talk about and then some space to talk and, hopefully, I met that brief.

I include the slides I used with a brief commentary owing to my habit of not putting much detail on the average slide.

The main points I tried to cover were:

“Engagement” is a term used by people who have power. It is partial and conditional. People who don’t have power tend to use terms like influence or, indeed, power.

A couple of models worth examining in this context are

• the venerable “Ladder of Participation”. This is not to suggest that local authorities should only engage in processes that hand over citizen control. They should be clear about the degree of real participation that they are permitting in any given process.
• the rather good (Scottish) National Standards on Community Engagement. These have been around for a few years but, frankly, community engagement hasn’t changed much since Lao Tzu’s day. They seem to me to provide a useful checklist for planning community engagement campaigns.
• the echo model from CDX. An interesting way to think about how engaging with external communities interelates with your internal culture.

I think it’s important to remember that digital communities are in no way separate from real world communities. In fact where communities build online people often want to get together in the real world. I used the example of the Jelly movement which is a real-world get together of homeworkers who find each other and network online as well as offline.

Then I showed a few case studies and encouraged people to think about where this is going. I was really struck by John Naughton’s question about what you could have foreseen, 20 years after the creation of the printing press, of the impact the printing press would have on society. We are 20 years after the invention of the world wide web, technology that has, effectively, handed a printing press to every citizen.

Thanks again to LGComms Scotland for inviting me. I hope to be invited back, or indeed, to run a workshop at your organisation.

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They suit communications staff from Category One Responders with warning and informing responsibilities as well as emergency planning staff with an interest in warning and informing and other aspects of communication in emergencies.

These one-day sessions have proved really popular. We make them interactive and use a set of real world case studies. They are tailored to the needs of Category One responders

We can also organise training for LRFs or SCGs as well as individual responders.

We’ll be in Cardiff on 23rd April 2012, Exeter 24th April, London on 1st May and Birmingham on 2nd May.

For more information and to book click here

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Social media is beginning to prove its worth in community engagement roles across public services. Some police services have had locally-based accounts for some time (notably the Greater Manchester and West Midlands forces). West Mercia are just putting their toe in the water. Of course being late to the party means you can learn from those who went before. @southsidecops seems to being doing a decent job and they came in to their own at the end of January when a suspicious vehicle caused widespread disruption.

[UPDATE: 1400 13/02/2012 Those same @southsidecops have pointed me to this blog from a local reporter which also praises their work over this incident]

Here’s an edited version of their work around that incident (bear with it it’s an embed from Storify). Click here if it’s not working for you.

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Which is all very interesting.

In an emergency do we want to be sending images out? And what would we seek to achieve? Wouldn’t a link to a public information bulletin be much more useful?

Well London Fire Brigade have been tweeting pictures of live incidents for a while

It lets people know what the service is up to and, potentially, reduces the number of curious onlookers tempted to approach the scene and get in the way. Also it will reduce harmful speculation of the nature and scale of the incident.

Yesterday the Met Office tweeted a picture

This is subtly different to what they usually tweet (which is a link to the appropriate webpage upon which this picture appears) because an image is easier to manipulate on a mobile device, and on other clients.

It has reduced functionality in other ways. A web page gives you access to links and sources of other information which aren’t available here. It’s less instant though.

Like all things in communications it’s horses for courses but there are courses where an image would make an excellent horse. He said, mangling his metaphor.

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