Behind the Badge OC has the look and feel of a community news site, with articles that focus on the everyday lives of local men and women.
Except these folks all wear uniforms, and their employers foot the bill for the publication.
The idea for Behind the Badge was spurred by several police-related controversies that beset Orange County in recent years. The trend met another—a new generation of leadership that’s come up on community policing and has a different view of communications.
“Silence is not an option with advances in social media,” said Fullerton Police Department Chief Dan Hughes, who took the lead in 2011 after death of Kelly Thomas, a mentally ill homeless man who died of injuries sustained during an arrest by Fullerton police officers. “If we don’t tell our story, someone else will.”
Telling the cops’ side became a business opportunity for Irvine-based Cornerstone Communications, a public relations firm founded by John Christensen, Kathleen Freed, and Bill Rams, who used to wear through shoe leather on the police beat at the Orange County Register.
Behind the Badge’s reporting staff includes a number of Rams’ old Register colleagues whose bylines will likely ring familiar with local readers—Greg Hardesty, Jaimee Lynn Fletcher, and Kat Nguyen.
Retired Anaheim Police Department Capt. Joe Vargas serves a columnist and editor-at-large.
Timely
The publication’s debut proved timely, as the national debate on police use of deadly force escalated shortly thereafter.
“We launched June 30, and in August [the shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed [African-American] teenager, by a (white) police officer in Ferguson, Missouri] put policing on the front pages of the newspapers across America,” Rams said. “There’s a lot of questioning going on about police tactics, body cameras, and all this kind of stuff. Our role is to try to show the stories that aren’t being told.”
Behind the Badge doesn’t hide the fact that it counts on sponsorships from police agencies to support the publication—it discloses the nature of its relationships in the site’s “about” section. Rams contends that the stories his staff presents to the general public approximate the sort of coverage daily newspapers once provided for the communities they covered.
“It’s sad what’s happened in the mainstream media,” he said. “They just don’t have the resources they once had to cover some of these stories.”
The Fullerton Police Department is one of eight Orange County agencies featured daily on Behind the Badge. The others are Anaheim, La Habra, Huntington Beach, Garden Grove, Cypress and Westminster, along with Anaheim’s fire department. Bigger agencies pay $4,000 a month for eight stories and professional photography; smaller cities pay about half as much.
Behind the Badge had 385,000 unique visitors last month and recently had 15,565 Facebook fans.
Roots
The digital publication is only 6 months old, but its roots reach to 2009 when Rams created a blog by the same name for the Anaheim Police Department.
“The media was downsizing, and Anaheim Police Department was having a hard time getting their story out,” Rams said. “And not only did we build a pretty decent-size audience, it had the benefit of building the morale for the troops—getting the pat on the back when one of the detectives solved the good case, or [an officer] engaged in some sort of heroic act.”
The California Police Chiefs Association took note and hired Rams’ team in 2010. He published a magazine that highlights the association’s programs, got it up to speed with social media, and established a crisis communications program—Cornerstone Communications offers one-on-one consultations when police chiefs need extra help handling an issue in their communities.
“The police chief is in a unique spot,” Rams said. “Like many executives, they have a lot of different audiences that they have to think about. They have their troops, they have their community, different political interests … so [speaking generally] you can see how a police chief [could] freeze if he doesn’t have a lot of experience in dealing with this kind of stuff, and might want to be thoughtful or err on the side of not saying anything, because, ‘Man, I’m afraid if I say the wrong thing it’s going to come back to bite me.’
“If you want to be an effective crisis communicator, you need to start today, especially in today’s environment with Ferguson and [the recent death of Eric Garner in New York]. And President Obama—he said mistrust in police is corroding America—so if that’s not a wake-up call for law enforcement that they got to do a better job, I don’t know what is,” Rams said.
Early Efforts
Rams tried to expand on his initial work with the Anaheim police blog with an OC-wide effort. But “budgets were going in a bad direction, there wasn’t interest,” he said, adding that even his collaboration with Anaheim wound down.
“And Ferguson, Fullerton, all this bad stuff hadn’t happened yet. So it really didn’t go anywhere. Law enforcement is mostly reactive. When something happens, they tell you what happened, versus pushing out all the news.”
The lull turned out to be short-lived—Fullerton’s then-Interim Police Chief Hughes called Rams in January of 2012, asking for help “rebuilding relationships with the community” after the Thomas incident.
“The police department took this incident and made themselves a better police department,” Rams said. “They brought in the office of the independent review to look at all the police department’s policies and procedures, and by the time I came in, they already implemented 54 of the 59 recommendations. And in addition to that, they have solved a bunch of big crimes. The challenge was, not that many people knew about it. Our role was to come in and help the police department tell the story. We created … fullertonpolice news.com, and many of those stories got picked up.”
Anaheim PD—coping with two officer-involved shootings—also called in 2012. The agency is now in a “much better place with the community,” Rams said.
‘Dust That Off’
Hughes invited Rams early last year to present a regional model of Behind the Badge at the Police Chiefs’ Association of Orange County meeting in Palm Springs.
“He said, ‘I think you need to dust that off and try it again. It’s a different world to- day,’ ” Rams said. The “Anaheim, Fullerton, La Habra and Huntington Beach (police departments) decided to jump right in with us for the June 30 launch.”
The Garden Grove Police Department and Anaheim Fire and Rescue joined shortly thereafter, followed by contracts with the Cypress and Westminster police departments.
Rams said that he and his partners at Cornerstone Communications also have “some skin in the game” on the website as they allow the concept time to develop.
So far, so good—Rams said he is “seeing interest” from Santa Clara and Sonoma counties’ police chiefs associations. He also said he recently talked with the International Association of Chiefs of Police in Alexandria, Va. “about a myriad of things, but it also included what we are doing with Behind the Badge.”
