In this post I refer to the beat bobby: not online crime investigators, high tech crime units, serious and organised crime or any other specialised unit. The everyday Police officer that we all see racing around the streets on blues and twos. For simplicity this also refers Neighbourhood Policing Teams (NPT) and to Police Community Support Officers (PCSO)
You may well ask, “what has online safety got to do with the ordinary beat bobby?” A lot more than you may think. The number 1 premise of e-safety: what happens in the virtual world happens in the real world!
More and more the response officer is having to deal with virtual world issues which spill over into the real world: harassment on Facebook, malicious texts, sexting, threats to kill, bullying and much much more.
The responsibility on any officer cannot be under-estimated. He or she is the first person on scene at every crime imaginable, and therefore has to have an immense knowledge of law, procedure, policy, local intelligence amongst other things. Coupled with the ability and patience to fill out form after form, all of which require the details to be duplicated due to incompatibility of systems and then faxed, copied, emailed checked rubber stamped…..for every single crime.
You could therefore understand if an officer sees yet another Facebook incident as a hindrance. To be fair, the vast majority of the incidents are. Social media makes it all too easy to say something on Twitter, Facebook or any other social networking platform which you wouldn’t ordinarily say face to face at someone. But it is worth remembering that sometimes those very threats or that intimidating behaviour can spill out to something far worse.
A quick look at the horrendous stories of Thomas Mullaney, at 15 year old boy who hanged himself, or of teenager Amanda Cummings who killed herself after being tormented by bullies, and the tragic story of Dominic Crouch who leapt off a roof because of gay taunts serves as a reminder that the the virtual world and the real world are implicitly linked.
But, ask a police officer what they understand by e-safety, online safety or whatever term we choose and many will not have the first idea. This is through no fault of their own: with many different priorities to juggle in one day, training that rarely deals with these issues and falling police numbers and budgets no-one could ever blame the officer for a lack of understanding.
The purpose of this post is to let any officers who are reading this know that I’m going to create some resources for you. What would you like to see, what knowledge do you feel you are lacking, is it a case of “how do you know what you don’t know?”
Leave me a reply and/or join me on Twitter, I would love to hear what you have to say.