Tayside Police pilots social media tool

Gordon Scobbie said he was excited about the prospect of being able to have a conversation with local people in real time through the new Mypolice.org website. The site was founded in 2009 by Lauren Currie and Sarah Drummond and is funded by Channel 4 and various "social entrepreneurs". The website aims to help identify weaknesses and opportunities in police services and allows people to send in their views on their local force. Police can then view this information and use it to improve services. "We just need to dot the 'i's and cross the 't's, but we're hoping that we're going to be working with Lauren on the Mypolice stuff and piloting that," said Scobbie, speaking at Kable's Public Sector Online event in London on 4 October 2010. But he acknowledged that taking social networking to the police "has its challenges", and said that police services are traditionally reluctant to open up such channels of communication. Lauren Currie said she hopes the site will create active online communities and provide "a neutral and independent space where every citizen has got a voice and every citizen has got a chance to see who their local police are". "You can remain anonymous or you can do it in a very personal and local way by putting in your postcode and then your local officer or response team. That conversation happens online, very much like the way your iPhone records your text messaging and it is open to the public for anybody to tweet or put forward their own social networking channels," she said. The site will be piloted by Tayside for three months. Mypolice.org will work closely with the police service to "define every function of the software" to make sure it fits the force's needs. "We don't want to put something out there, especially in these austere times, that doesn't really save money and really meet their business needs," she added. Currie agreed with Scobbie that setting up such a project has been quite difficult as police are not used to exploring social media to communicate with the public. "The police are a very risk averse organisation who are not typical tweeters so it has been a challenge, but it has been fantastic and we are very much advocates of getting every public service online no matter who you work for and what you do." Currie said the creation of her site has also opened up the debate about whether such mediums of communication should be implemented by organisations like Mypolice.org or by police forces themselves. "Only time will tell," she added.