Photo Courtesy: Facebook
The Palos Park (IL) Police Department will begin live streaming the police responses of one officer live on Facebook.
Palos Park Officer Ross Chibe will be video-streaming 911 calls this Friday night, November 3rd.
Palos Park Police Chief Joe Miller said, for the past three years, his department has used Twitter to give people a glimpse into what police officers’ jobs are like. An officer would tweet and provide pictures of what he or she was doing.
Miller called them “virtual ride-a-longs.”
Tonight’s event will take that a step further.
Chibe will work his beat fielding 911 calls while a colleague uses an iPad to shoot video of a night on patrol in Palos Park. The police department hopes to show people what a typical day on the job is like for a cop, especially when most people are sleeping soundly in their homes.
“We simply want to educate viewers and give them a little perspective, what really goes on when an officer is in the field on patrol or an actual call.,” Chief Joe Miller said.
This type of communication is exactly what Travis Yates, who leads the Courageous Leadership Seminar, discusses in front of law enforcement officials across the country.
In what he describes as “Courageous Communication,” Yates says that law enforcement must utilize technology to get their message to the public instead of waiting on the media.
“Why do we wait for an open record request to release camera footage,” Yates asked the audience at a seminar recently sponsored by Law Officer.
“Law enforcement should proactively show the public what our heroes do on a daily basis and that most definitely is not the current picture being shown by the media,” he went on to say.
We reached out to Yates on this story and he called the idea “brilliant.”
