Skip to Content, Navigation, or Footer.
Support the IDS in College Media Madness! Donate here March 24 - April 8.
Friday, March 29
The Indiana Daily Student

Tweeting police seek to catch the public eye

Indiana police have been using social media to relate to citizens and connect better. 

In the last 54 hours of 2016, Sgt. Todd Ringle took to Twitter, as he does regularly, and tweeted nine times with a total of 71 emojis – tiny red and blue cars, mugs of beer and smiling policemen to remind readers of who’s watching.

In the days leading up to the New Year, Ringle, an Indiana State Police public information officer based in Evansville, said he knew he had to remind the public of the dangers of drunken driving. He knew, too, he needed to get the public’s attention and simple text-based social media posts or media releases wouldn’t do the trick.

“Your (family emoji) (heart emoji) u, so don’t mess (up arrow emoji),” he tweeted Dec. 29.

As adept as Ringle is at making his tweets eye-catching – they regularly receive dozens or even hundreds of favorites and retweets – he’s not a native to the social media landscape. Ringle, 52, has spent the past 32 years as a state trooper and the past 16 as a PIO.

Like other officers and departments around the country, he’s adapted to an era of technology that enables law enforcement to speak to the public more quickly and directly than ever.

“By getting creative with emojis and pictures, your message will go farther,” Ringle said.

Though he began using Twitter in 2010, Ringle said he took some time to warm up to using pictorial language in his public messages.

As a long-time PIO and self-described old-school state trooper, he worried that adopting internet speech might make him appear unprofessional.

However, he follows PIOs from across the country on social media, and after he saw the success some of their posts had, he decided to adapt.

Now, his idea of a good tweet has gone from one that gets between 20 and 50 retweets to one that gets 150 and reaches 20,000 people, he said.

“The way I look at it is, if it gets people interested in the information, that’s good,” 
he said.

Bloomington Police Department PIO Capt. Steve Kellams hasn’t taken to using emojis, but he said that’s largely out of personal preference.

“I’m not a ‘WTF,’ ‘OMG’ kind of guy,” he said. “I’d just as soon spell it out. Guys make fun of me because I use punctuation in my texts.”

Five officers now assist on running social media, and Kellams has regular meetings with them to keep the content consistent. The department’s first Instagram page went online in November, and in 2016, its Facebook page grew from 4,000 to 14,000 likes.

Sgt. Philip Hensley, the ISP PIO for Jasper, Indiana, hadn’t used Twitter before taking the job in 2013, but once he did, he said the drive to reach more people became addictive. He adopted elements of Twitter speech even before Ringle did, and he said the pair spearheaded a movement to make sure all ISP PIOs used Twitter.

Hensley, 35, injects a strain of humor into his tweets, often accompanied by pictures. A Christmas Eve post showed a humorous letter from Santa urging Hensley not to pull him over for speeding, and a New Year’s Eve post reminded people pairing football-watching with beer that the scoreboard that matters is an Intoximeter reading “.000.”

He’s come to believe that making his account fun to follow makes it more approachable than a wall of information, he said.

Finding new ways to effectively reach the public has become a necessity, Hensley said. TV news affiliates broadcast in Jasper are based in Evansville; Terre Haute, Indiana; and Louisville, Kentucky.

“I don’t exactly have a large media market,” Hensley said. “I can’t get on TV or radio all the time.

So, by using social media, it was a genuine change for a lot of people, because they hadn’t had that interaction with law enforcement.”

The social media age could thrust police-press relations into a new realm altogether.

Kellams believes in the press’s role as a government watchdog but police departments’ abilities to reach the public directly could terminate those relationships in places where they’re already frayed, he said.

He said he could even see some departments using Facebook Live or Periscope to broadcast daily briefings rather than go through traditional media.

“At some point in time, somewhere, there’s going to be a department where they won’t talk to the press,” he said.

These PIOs have seen some drawbacks to social media, too, though.

Kellams said people, including residents of Bloomington, Illinois, and Bloomington, Minnesota, have started to message the department on Facebook when they should be calling 911.

Lapses in social media judgment can result in more serious incidents.

After a sniper killed five Dallas police officers in July, the city’s police department tweeted a picture of a suspect. The man, Mark Hughes, in the image was not the shooter.

Even though he turned himself in and was released by police a few hours after the shooting, the tweet remained online until the next evening and garnered more than 40,000 retweets. A lawyer for Hughes and his brother said in a press conference that day the pair had received thousands of death threats.

Hensley followed the aftermath of the shooting as it happened and said he was dismayed by the Dallas Police Department’s Twitter presence.

“They were getting kind of vile,” he said. “They were basically operating based off of emotion.”

The shooting and aftermath were just one of many events – many of which have been shootings of unarmed black men and the following protests and police response – that have strained relationships between police and the public in recent years. Social media isn’t the cure to the problem but it could be an ingredient, Hensley said.

“If there ever was a time to start trying to figure out how to build police relationships with the public, it’s now,” he said. “There are a lot of places that need to work on that. This is a good way to start.”

Get stories like this in your inbox
Subscribe