Are you engaged with your community today? What is engagement? 

It is 9 am on a Tuesday morning, a typical weekday in your community. You are enjoying your first cup of coffee and going through your inbox when the ground beneath your feet begins to tremble. Your whiteboard falls and a bookcase full of binders tumbles down on top of it. The trembling lasts for 60 seconds, you can hear some yelling and the dust begins to settle around you. The phones start ringing and everyone begins to clamor for information. What do we do? Who is doing what? What happens now? There is the fear that you can hear in every message. Are you prepared? Do you have a social media plan? This workshop will focus on building your social engagement today, strengthening those relationships, so that you are ready for an emergency that awaits you. 

Today, the key word is community engagement, but building that engagement must start today. This workshop will provide a brief overview of the Sacramento Police Department’ s (SPD) multi-faceted community engagement program that has helped us build our community engagement in Sacramento and will include case study examples, both successes and learning opportunities. SPD ‘ s plan includes better engaging our community through use of Geographic Policing, Nextdoor, traditional social media and expanded neighborhood watch. The day to day time and work spent building your community engagement today, will pay off as you lean on those relationships to help support you during a critical incident. In this interactive and collaborative workshop, students will participate in hands on table top exercises utilizing common social media platforms during critical incidents. Students will leave with a critical incident checklist that can provide some structure to their social media response during an emergency, and provide some guidance on building that program starting today.