Social Media Assisted Career Suicide Syndrome

Social media has become the way of the world today.  And nearly every law enforcement and fire agency has an official social media account. Additional, nearly every employee, both sworn and not, have personal social media accounts.  If leveraged properly, an official social media account can really aid an agency’s reputation.  Of course, a poorly worded post can explode to destroy any trust the agency builds with its community.  And an employee’s personal opinion on a private account can be misconstrued to be an agency’s official stance.

Most agencies have fairly robust social media policies that direct both kinds of accounts.  And controlling the official account is not that difficult.  Written policy, controlling access, and oversight should prevent issues with the official site.  But what about those personal accounts?

Most law enforcement agencies have policies about how employees reflect on or comment on the agency that tries to balance the individual’s First Amendment rights with protecting the agency.  The bottom line on that balance really is that you can publish anything you want, but the agency can fire you or even take legal action against you. 

Dave Statter (www.statter911.com) has coined a phrase for this:  Social Media Assisted Career Suicide Syndrome (SMACSS).  He frequently posts links to stories about first responders making these posts and suffering the consequences.  If you are not a victim of your own SMACSS, most of the stories will make you wonder how they can be so #$% stupid.  Unfortunately for those agencies, damage to their agency's reputation in the eyes of the public as already occurred, even if you fire the offender.

The solution may be example training.  Regularly sharing stories of these Social Media Assisted Career Suicides keeps the subject fresh in the employee’s mind and makes them not want to be the subject of these posts.  The Navy/Marine Corps does this with safety by publishing a “Summary of Mishaps” listing incidents where service members made “errors in judgement” that resulted in injury or damage.  Many times during on or off duty events, one of us would look at the other and stop, saying we did not want to be in the summary.  Such a solution should work for any agency.