Police Blogging..(Not Blotting) Innovative in its New Creation

Yesterday when I was in class, Maima and I compiled a presentation for the class about something we thought was really interesting about what people or particular groups are doing with blogs these days.  You might be surprised, out of all the magazines, corporations, school deapartments, etc. that twitter and blog many police departments do not have blogs.  So I went on the web searching and searching for all the major city police departments that have blogs, and only one came up (that was actually REALLY good), the Los Angeles Police Department.  Chicago, Atlanta, and even New York’s police departments do not have blogs, and that was shocking because these are cities just as big, if not bigger than Los Angeles.

The LAPD blog is so organized, it is almost scary.  I recommend that if you have time to check it out to do so.  The police department updates their website at least two to three times per day with the latest on the crime occuring in specific areas.  Also, the organization is largely organized around widgets on the right hand side of the page.  The organization parallels what we have been discussing in class because Dr. Reed wants us to have widgets and use those widgets to make a clear organization of our blog.  When we were showing the class the LAPD blog, lots of questions and feedback were implemented into our presentation because of how applicable this blog was to how we can make our blogs ten times better.  What makes this blog a good blog?  In terms of Merlin, the writer(s) of the blog maintain a distinct voice, the page is clutter free, and maintaing control of the blog… just to name a few.  Two weaknesses of this blog were the lack of linking to other sources outside of the blog page and heavy censorship of comments.  For example, each of the hundreds of links on the page only linked to other places within the blog that were affiliated with the LAPD and the blog has a disclaimer close to the top of the right side explaing that the blog reserves the right to edit comments and delete them based on their content.

So, in tems of Memes, this blog would not be good for a memex format because the blog is so busy trying to grab the attention of people who want to fight crime in LA.  The blog has a clear goal, to plead with the public for information and encourage the citizens to use all the media available to them in order to contact the police department.  You can text “crimes” to the number posted on the blog to give tips to fight crime.  Bush’s “As we may Think,” supplements several functions I mentioned about this blog because Bush lets his reader know that the information presented to people on the web is actually knowledge, and being able to use everything available to us (similar to the LAPD reaches out to its citizens), is knowledge in itself.

On a final note, I wanted to share the San Francisco Public Safety blog, headed by the mayor’s office, so that you could get an idea at what stage most police blogging is generally in.  This blog is far less advanced than the LAPD’s, but it is attempting to fulfill its purpose.

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