Letter to the Editor: NOPD deluging supporters with unneccessary emails

[The following letter to the editor was written by Tim Garrett, administrator of NOLAhoods.com]

I would like to propose some changes to the way New Orleans Police Department uses NOLAReady.info to disseminate information. Currently, the volume of email being generated through NOPD’s 12 “channels” – representing eight Districts along with four administrative offices – is so enormous that it overwhelms readers’ in-boxes. In fact, since it first began using the City’s NOLAReady service in mid-August, NOPD traffic has been several times that of all the other channels (for example, weather advisories, Amber Alerts and boil water orders) combined!

Because NOLAReady is intended to broadcast only time-sensitive, urgent (so presumably infrequent) alerts, it does not offer readers an alternative way to access messages, such as a weekly digest or online archive. Compounding the problem has been the policy of NOPD’s Public Information Office (PIO) to relay announcements through the district channels as well as its own. Likewise, the Community Coordinating (CoCo) Sergeants often distribute their own maps, meeting reminders or invitations which then get rebroadcast by others.

Receiving sometimes as many as ten messages a day, subscribers are confronted by too much information to process. This leaves us neighborhood leaders (NOPD’s closest followers and staunchest allies) the following no-win choice: Either deal with the daily deluge… or pull the plug. For this reason, I am asking Chief Serpas and the staff at PIO to consider paring down the quantity of e-blasts by consolidating most of them into a weekly summary, thereby reserving daily traffic to matters of an urgent nature (for example, wanted posters or hotline bulletins).

I believe that non-critical items such as investigation updates, sobriety checkpoint announcements, fundraiser flyers, department newsletters, and holiday safety guides properly belong on a calendar or web page. In fact, I have undertaken to do just this by adding as many police-related items as possible to the “NOPD” page at NOLAhoods.com, where people can find a community meeting calendar and links to everything from each district’s Facebook page to an archive of past issues of the NOPD Newsletter. Among the additional resources I include there are ProjectNOLA‘s online radio scanner, my “COMSTAT & NONPACC Guide“, NOPD’s entry on Wikipedia, and a map of NOPD facilities. Each month, I also publish a map of the routes for each district’s monthly Crime Prevention Walk.

The so-called “e-blast” system was originally spearheaded in 2007 by then-Captain Kirk Bouyelas (later promoted to major, and now serving as Deputy Superintendent in command of the Investigation & Support Bureau) to promote collaboration with community groups in Second District. Residents universally welcomed this new two-way conduit of information, and despite being labor intensive – Bouyelas had to maintain a list of interested citizens, who then relayed messages to their neighbors – this email bucket brigade persisted for almost a year (an archive of early e-blasts can be found online at http://nopd2blast.blogspot.com). In April, 2008, I urged Major Bouyelas to move Second District’s e-blast system over to Google Groups (for a variety of technical reasons, including an easier way for people to opt in or out), and suggested that other districts do likewise.

The following two years saw the formal assignment of information officers to manage each district’s e-blasts and to post UCR (Uniform Crime Reporting) summaries. Citizens attending monthly NONPACC (New Orleans Neighborhood Policing and Crime Council) meetings arrived better informed and more aware of trends in crime than they had ever been, now that they could subscribe directly to their NOPD district’s e-blasts and download crime statistics.

When Superintendent Serpas took the helm at NOPD in mid-2010, he began reorganizing the department, updating procedures and implementing programs aimed at providing greater transparency, promoting trust and establishing deeper ties between NOPD and the New Orleans community. Among his many reforms, Serpas decided to transfer operation of the districts’ e-blast systems over to a little-known public service announcement system owned and operated by Cooper Industries called NOLAReady. I discussed the proposed change with the Superintendent at a June COMSTAT meeting, and recall agreeing that it made sense from an administrative point of view, because NOLAReady’s staff would manage the system on NOPD’s behalf. By August 19, 2010, the transition was complete, and former Google Groups subscribers were summarily informed how to make the switch to NOLAReady.

However, the previously unannounced changeover surprised and disappointed many computer-savvy residents – not just because NOLAReady lacks several of Google Groups’ most useful features, as noted earlier: an archive, a file repository, and the option to receive weekly digests instead of daily posts – but also because NOLAReady is a one-way (outbound-only) conduit; no longer can citizens reply to an e-blast to ask for, or provide, additional information. Gone are the Excel spreadsheets brimming with monthly crime statistics broken down by district, zone and category. Worst of all, for NOPD followers at least, because there is no way to peruse past posts, subscribing to NOLAReady presents an all-or-nothing proposition: Either cope with the reams of well-meaning-but-not-always-urgent “alerts” being sent out each week … or unsubscribe.

I often hear of citizens doing the latter, unsubscribing from NOPD’s e-blasts in a desperate act of in-box self-preservation. For folks in this category, I have created an alternative known as “NOPDeBlast” – rebroadcasting e-blasts in a single stream (or “feed”) on Twitter.com – which anyone can follow or pull items of interest using Twitter’s search facility.

Meanwhile, Chief Serpas asserts that the overall response to NOLAReady has been positive, though he concedes it – like any new undertaking – could be “tightened up.” My hope is that NOPD will moderate its use of NOLAReady as follows:

1. Collate non-critical reports (stats, kudos, PR, maps, invitations, PSAs, arrests, etc.) into a single, weekly “digest” of information;

2. Discontinue re-broadcasting PIO channel’s messages through the Districts’ channels;

3. Only send urgent and emergency alerts on a daily basis, as necessary;

4. Relegate announcements (walks, Race Against Crime, meetings, etc.) to an online calendar of events, and include timely reminders in the weekly digest.

I believe these modifications will appeal to those who have abandoned NOPD’s NOLAReady channels altogether, hopefully encouraging them to resubscribe. Community leaders already tend to be inundated with email; by taking steps to respect their in-boxes, NOPD stands to regain a slew of these civic-minded individuals as part of their audience. I appeal to Chief Serpas to enact these policy changes, for the benefit of everyone involved.

– Tim Garrett, NOLAhoods.com