As Jessica Tisch took her seat at the Teddy Roosevelt desk as New York City’s 48th police commissioner, a pile of urgent tasks awaited her. Revitalizing the way the nation’s largest police department communicates may not be at the top—but it should be.
If we’ve learned anything in the years since George Floyd, it’s that policing needs to be communicated as effectively as it is executed. Negative public perception has real-life consequences, ranging from police recruitment and retention to the size and sufficiency of the public-safety budget. Commissioner Tisch has a proven track record of digital innovation—she helped take the NYPD from typewriters to customized smartphone in just a few years—as well as a unique talent for cutting through red tape. Now she has a chance to give the world’s greatest police department the public image it deserves.
The NYPD has a robust public information office responsible for more than 200 social media accounts, several video and graphics units, and a whole lot of civilian and uniformed personnel. But robust doesn’t always mean optimal. The following are several areas where Tisch’s organizational and leadership skills can steer the communications ship in the right direction.
Know when to centralize and when to decentralize. First and foremost, the commissioner needs to determine what her messaging goals are and disseminate them to everyone speaking on behalf of the department. These should be based not only on her overarching policing objectives but also on an understanding of the issues that concern New Yorkers in each borough. In an ideal world, police messaging would consist of nonstop promotion ceremonies and cute K-9 photos, but the public cares more about quality of life, disorder, and traffic.
There’s no shortage of talented personnel at 1 Police Plaza, but empowering them will require untying some of the bureaucratic knots that led to the creation of units with overlapping communications roles. Often these duplicates were created with good intentions, as a way to speed up sluggish processes or to clear out cobwebs of boss approvals. Tisch can determine where the bottlenecks are that lead to the creation of these overlaps and decide whether to consolidate them or at least to ensure that they allocate their resources effectively and follow department guidelines, from unified messaging to standardized font usage and design. Most importantly, Tisch should ensure that these units are oriented toward serving the public first, not the department.
When it comes to decentralizing, it’s important once again to lead with city residents in mind. Most New Yorkers want to know what’s happening on their block. They shouldn’t have to follow several accounts to get information a la carte. Local precinct accounts are a highly effective way of getting out local messaging to people in different neighborhoods. If I live on the Upper East Side, the 19th precinct’s social media accounts should be my one-stop shop for local crime patterns and traffic closures. These accounts, manned by local digital communication officers, can establish a direct line of communication between the public and the department. Properly manned, managed, and guided by 1 Police Plaza, they can strike the right balance between unified messaging and local specificity. This approach would empower officers and help them set priorities.
Tisch should also consider merging or removing excess social media accounts that might cause confusion or that serve the interests of their operators more than those of the public.
Meet the public where they are. While traditional media like newspapers and cable TV news still play an important role, most New Yorkers, especially younger ones, get their news from social media, YouTube, podcasts, and the like. Just as newsrooms are moving much of their operations online, the NYPD should shift resources and personnel to emphasize digital communications and begin treating it as equal in importance to traditional media. In its digital work, the NYPD shouldn’t rely only on its own channels but should partner with content creators with built-in audiences otherwise hard to reach.
The NYPD should give access to New York-based podcasters, YouTubers, and other social-media influencers, providing opportunities for interviews, partnerships, and behind-the-scenes exclusives. These new forms of media may be less predictable and harder to “control,” but they open a window to a new audience that the department might be missing—and even alienating. In the past, the NYPD built a relationship with a popular account that shared subway curiosities with millions of followers. The department often asked this account to share images of wanted sexual predators. Such relationships are invaluable both to the work of policing and to public relations.
If anyone can eliminate bureaucracy, break through egos and inertia, and shoot down “we’ve always done it this way” arguments, it’s Tisch. And it’s not just the city that’s counting on her; officers on patrol want her to make their jobs safer and more efficient and effective. Communicating more clearly, trimming redundancies, and empowering the local precincts are crucial steps in that direction.
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