Inside the strange new world of police PR efforts

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Jordan Heath-Rawlings You can find a lot of people and a lot of content on substack. These days, the digital publishing platform has become a go-to for anyone who wants to share their voice and perspective with the public. You can find far right and far left political views on the platform. You can find media criticism, sports, writing, literature, local news, science and research, history, economics, and the Winnipeg Police Service people create substack newsletters for many reasons, but the Winnipeg cops seem to be the first ones to launch a newsletter to do public relations for a police force under fire. Their newsletter is just one example of the way police forces are trying to change the narrative of suspicion and mistrust that has taken hold as the public has increasingly seen their abuses of power, bullying, and, of course, police killings of vulnerable people, particularly indigenous and black citizens. Is this attempt working? Should it be working? Should the police, who are a public service, supposedly existing nearly to enforce the law, be advocating for their own side of the story? And if they can do that, how far should they go in its pursuit? I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Julia-Simone Rutgers, is a writer and a reporter based in Winnipeg. She was the inaugural Justice Fund writer in residence at the Walrus, where she reported this story. Hi, Julia-Simone.

Julia-Simone Rutgers Hello, how are you?

Jordan I’m doing really well. Thank you for joining us.

Julia-Simone Rutgers Thanks for having me.

Jordan I want to start by asking you just to set the scene for what we’re about to discuss. What was the climate around the police service in Winnipeg earlier this year? What were they dealing with and what was going on?

Julia-Simone Rutgers Because we’re about to talk about what they did in response. Yes. So earlier this year, like many cities throughout Canada, when Winnipeg police were dealing with the convoy protests. So in this city in particular, there were blockades kind of set up around the provincial legislature. It was a several weeklong occupation, and police were in a bit of a confused position. They had, you know, folks on one side saying, we need to clear this out. We need to get these folks out of, you know, the downtown. And, you know, the softness of the police in response to these protesters is reprehensible compared to some of the ways police have treated other protests in the past. And folks were talking in particular about a lot of Black Lives Matter protests that happened in the summer of 2020. And then you had a whole other contingent of people who were saying, this is free speech. This is our right to protest. You are actually soft on those other protesters in the summer of 2020. So if you came down hard on us, then that would be a political bias. And so police were in a difficult position. Shall we say. And yeah, what we’re about to get into is how they responded. Tell me what they did, because it’s a unique way, at least I think so far, of attempting to communicate a message. Yeah, as far as I know, they’re one of, if not the only police service who chose to respond to a crisis in this way. But they hopped onto Substack, which is a blog platform, subscription based blog platform that’s kind of risen in prominence lately. It’s been used by the likes of REDACTED from the New York Times. I believe a lot of former journalists who left the publications they were working for headed on to substack. So they created a substantial newsletter, and it’s free, although you can subscribe to it. And they started writing posts that dealt originally directly with the protests, and now they deal with a wide variety of topics. But those posts were written by members of the service, including the police chief himself, Danny Smith, and it was just sort of a direct institution to public communication tool.

Jordan What’s the newsletter? Like you mentioned, it’s written by a variety of police officers. What do they write about? What kind of perspective are they trying to put out here? I guess my main question is, how far is this away from police press releases or stuff you would find on their website?

Julia-Simone Rutgers That’s what’s I think most interesting about it is it varies so much in tone from what you would expect from a police press release. So where a police press release is very to the point, it’s de-identified, there’s not a lot of personality to a police press release. This newsletter, it comes across as a very human attempt to communicate. So I just pulled it up before we hopped on this call. And one that’s quite recent, that I thought was interesting is it’s titled Policing and Politics, and it’s written by the police chief. And he goes over the different legislative tools that police are beholden to the Police Services Act, the Police board, how city council and police are intertwined, how the budget works. And, you know, he sort of at the end of this post, he starts to wax poetic a bit about how he thinks social media has had a sort of negative impact on the relationship between politics and policing. He talks about Donald Trump. He talks about how there needs to be nuanced on what the police put out publicly, which I think is maybe even a little bit ironic given the method he’s using to make that point. But it’s a sort of personal, almost attempt to convey the inside of the police institution. So it’s not about necessarily a particular crime, what the details are, what the public needs to know. It’s almost like opening a window into what’s going on in the mind of police executives. They have some sort of lighter posts. You know, they partnered with the Western Hockey League. There was an update on the police and Fire games.

Jordan But some of them are quite opinionated pieces on topics in policing right now from the police perspective, an organization that, as you describes, kind of getting it from both sides, especially during the Convoy protests. How has it been received? Is it working at what it’s intended to do?

Julia-Simone Rutgers That’s an excellent question. So I got the chance to speak to the police chief in writing this story, and I asked him how it was being received. And in his mind, I think it’s gotten a mixed response was his reply. When it first launched, there was a lot of social media fanfare about it. There are a lot of people critical of the decision to get on substack, to have this very direct personal relationship between the police and the public. There were some op-eds posted and some opinion pieces that criticized this approach for the police. But on the other side, the police chief says that there have been people in his inbox who are quite grateful for the newsletter. At the time of writing the story, it had garnered a few hundred subscriptions, but the posts get up to 50 readers. So people are perhaps paying attention, but the response has been mixed. I think there are people who are on side, according to Danny Smyth, and there are people who are a lot more critical of that approach of speaking directly to the public as chief of police.

Jordan And your work for the Walrus in this case sort of begins with the Winnipeg Police Service, but also dives into newer public relations tactics being used by all kinds of police forces. And I guess what I want to ask is, it must be really interesting to dig into the arts and science of doing PR for cops. What attracted you to this story?

Julia-Simone Rutgers Yeah, so that’s a great question. Early in my career, I wrote a lot about the police, actually. I started my career in Nova Scotia, and they were going through a time of putting a moratorium on street checks. And this was a really big conversation in Nova Scotia. There’s a long history of racism and policing, and particularly towards the black community there. And I happened to be black. And so that was a big topic for me. I was paying close attention to that. And I find the institutions of policing, the business of policing the inside of policing, to be quite fascinating because I think it’s often such a polarizing conversation. And I think there is a lot of public response to policing that comes across sometimes a little bit lacking nuance. It’s all bad or it’s all good and there’s no in between. And this move to get on Substack, it just confused me. I just found it very baffling that they would make the choice to try for this humanizing almost or attempt to humanize their relationship with the public. And I pitched the story to the Walrus editors. I was working on another big story at the time and had a little bit of spare time and they came back and there was a lot of interest in it. It’s not something that had been done before. This police on substack thing with the convoy protests across the country, police responses were definitely center stage. And I found, as I talked to Danny Smyth about this, I almost understood where he was coming from. I had to kind of walk away from that interview and be like, okay, so where did my initial reaction of this feels off to me really come from? Because what he’s saying is making sense. And that sort of led into that deeper dive into police PR and just how they establish trust, I think, in the community. I think it all comes back to establishing trust between police and the public, which is something that just fascinates me.

Jordan Where is that trust right now? What do we know about how much people trust the police these days? And, you know, this goes back before the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protest and, you know, word of indigenous Canadians being stopped or even shot by the police. How bad is it?

Julia-Simone Rutgers And the police recognize how tarnished that image has become over the last several years. Yeah, that’s a great question and I mean, I think it almost answers the question itself. You know, that relationship is strained right now. What was so interesting about the convoy protests is that and this is something that comes up in the story, it angered the base that hadn’t yet turned on the police. But I think even before George Floyd, before in Winnipeg Aisha Hudson’s death, police have had declining trust from the public. So there were some Angus Read polls from 2018 that said, you know, confidence was starting to decline in police. Canadians were losing trust in the RCMP. Canadians were losing trust in their local police forces. It’s been sort of sliding for a number of years. It’s more recent than people think. I think there was a little bit of an uptick a little less than ten years ago, and in about 2014, there was a little bit more confidence in the justice system. And then that starts to slide in 16, 17, 18 and onwards, and now it’s down to just about a third of Canadians think they have trust in their court system. About half of Canadians have trust in the RCMP. There is a mounting lack of confidence in policing and injustice systems more broadly. I do think police are very much aware of that tarnished image. And I think that that’s why we’re starting to see I know we’re going to get into a couple of other things that we touch on in this story, but I think this is why we’re starting to see these unconventional approaches to public relations, is because policing is under scrutiny. I think officers recognize from the sort of beat cop level, that, you know, the public’s trust in them has declined. And I think that that makes its way up the chain. I know the police chief here in Winnipeg, Danny Smyth, he said that public trust, the erosion of that public trust has had a big impact on his officers. They’re frustrated. It gets in the way, according to them, of them being able to do their job if the public doesn’t trust them. Danny Smith, in particular, is very attuned, I think, to social media. And that is definitely a space where the police are under a lot of scrutiny. You see videos of events that circulate on social media, and the conversations that come out of those often reflect quite poorly on the police. And I think that there is a rising awareness, and I think that police are feeling defensive about it. That’s I think that’s a big part of why we’re seeing what we’re seeing these days in terms of PR approaches.

Jordan How do those PR approaches try to walk the line, I guess, between humanizing the police, as you kind of describe in some of their posts, but also not trying to gloss over the awful stuff that cops sometimes do. And your piece you mentioned that, you know, around the time that the substack was starting, the Winnipeg Police Service had shot and killed three indigenous people in ten days. Now, that’s something that no substance can gloss over, and I can see it being read as really kind of crass and to be trying to refurbish the image in the wake of, like, actual lives being lost. You know what I mean?

Julia-Simone Rutgers Absolutely. No, that is the tricky question. And I think that’s what policing institutions across Canada are still trying to figure out. This particular approach of jumping on substack and really trying to humanize the service is so unique because I think so often the police have tried just to deal directly with incidents as they come. So the deaths of those three indigenous folks, and most notably Aisha Hudson, who was 16, and that was April 2020. In the sort of wake of that, the police came out with a bunch of reasons. They came out with a bunch of answers as to why they were justified in their approach. And it’s always this sort of, you guys weren’t there. You don’t have the full story. This is what we’re trained to do, so on and so forth. And so I don’t think that they try not to gloss over the awful things that they sometimes do. I think the police internally and the public have a different definition of what accountability looks like. And for police, that means sending things through the legislative channels. So Independent reviews the Independent Investigations Unit is what it’s called here in Winnipeg, and they will investigate a police officer who’s involved in it with a situation like this. But those Independent Investigation Units are often staffed by retired police officers there’s not a lot of transparency between the IU and the public in terms of what’s going on in those investigations. And so often they’ll absolve a police officer of something that perhaps is perceived by the public as criminal and awful. And so I think, you know, I think the police are trying to find a balance in particular in the substack situation between humanizing themselves and more so, I think, explaining themselves. I think they’re trying to find a better way to say, no, I promise we’re thinking it through. This is why we’re doing what we’re doing. Rather than maybe directly responding to criticism of their tactics, criticism of their approach, they are doubling down on the this is why we do what we do. And I think that that can be used to gloss over some of that awful stuff. And we talked a little bit in the piece about different crisis firms that particularly in the States, have been brought on to deal with the fallout of often police involved shootings, which is what they officially call it, when police officers shoot and often kill people who are involved in an interaction with the police, shall we say. And you know, those PR firms, their jobs are often to directly gloss over the incident, to pivot the narrative away from criticism of police and to prop up the work that the police are doing. And so I do think that it leans more towards the glossing over, but through this sort of vein of trying to explain themselves. Well, speaking of crisis public relations firms trying to gloss things over, we’re going to talk about the other aspect of this that you get into in the piece, which is the Ottawa protests early last year. And we are now learning during the inquiry, and there were certainly reports of it back then, but during the height of those blockades in downtown Ottawa, the police hired a firm called Navigator. And just in case someone listening doesn’t know, maybe you can explain, first of all, what Navigator is and why that decision specifically for the police to work with them was pretty controversial. Absolutely. Yeah. So Navigator is an elite crisis management firm. Their tagline is when you can’t afford to lose. They brand themselves as high stakes strategic advisory and communications. Their executive chairman is a former progressive conservative strategist. He worked with former Premier Mike Harris. This man has also represented some high profile folks, including, briefly, CBC host Jian Ghomeshi. Former CBC Host Jian Ghomeshi they are a firm that tries to step in for politicians or political institutions or individuals, high profile individuals, if they’re going that route, to try and smooth over the narrative. The particular comms person who worked with the Ottawa police was communications manager for Fisher Freeland for a little while. So there’s a lot of sort of interconnection between Navigator and the upper crust of Canadian politics. What kind of message does it send when and I’m leaving the substance out of it, because that’s on a different level, I think, than this.

Jordan But what kind of message does it send when a police service hires a company that is basically known for trying to gloss over huge screwups, often involving illegal activity? And, like, look, I’m not casting aspersions on the police in this particular incident, but this is the optics we’re talking about, right?

Julia-Simone Rutgers No, exactly. And I think that’s why it didn’t make a ton of splash. There was a little bit of a headline about it at the time and now that it’s coming up in the inquiry, I imagine going to be a little bit more notice. But, yeah, I think that what that communicates is a police service that knows that it’s messing up and rather than taking direct accountability, is going to turn to some kind of method, any kind of method, to gloss over its mistakes. And this is where I was kind of going with this whole police accountability and public accountability are different definitions of the same word, because when we mess up in our day to day, there’s people to answer to you and you’ve got to take that moment of humility to say, yeah, we made this mistake. Here’s what we’re doing to fix it. Police. I think there’s this thread of defensiveness that means that police are going to turn to whatever option is going to not make them look bad. That’s not going to further tarnish they’re already eroding public image. And that, I think, to me, is what this turn to navigator is. It almost feels like a move of desperation. We know something has gone wrong here. We know that somebody’s going to take notice. So let’s try and get ahead of it and change the narrative in our favor, make sure that the public conversation is in our favor, less things get worse. That’s the perception that I think comes out of that. This has been a fascinating conversation.

Jordan But here’s my last question about all of these tactics, from the substance to hiring navigator, and I realize they’re varying in degrees. Do we know yet if these tactics work? And maybe the bigger question is, when we’re discussing police conduct around citizens, should these kind of tactics work in a just world?

Julia-Simone Rutgers Great question. What a great place to end things off, you know? Do we know if they work yet? I don’t think we do. A great quote from the story is from retired Vancouver police officer Laura McCenner, and he says it’s still a Wild West for PR. We’ve got this highly digital, online, social media driven world of sort of public commentary, right. With Twitter going through all that’s going through right now. We’re talking so much about what citizen journalism is, and police are in this difficult position where anyone can record them, anyone can comment publicly on what they’re doing. Anyone can voice these criticisms. Or maybe there weren’t the avenues to do so before and they want to keep control over that conversation. It’s been really easy for police to have control over the conversation for a long time. They feed a press release to journalists. Journalists, we’re busy folks. I think the practice for a long time was just to regurgitate those press releases. And in so doing, you know, not question, not push back, not put police in the position to have to answer to the public. And so the police are not used to answering to the public. And these attempts, you know, I personally, I don’t think that they’re going to work. Because if the idea is accountability, if the idea is, you know, a just world where police have a trusting relationship with the public, skirting accountability by trying to double down on your control over the narrative, be it through. Hiring crisis management to control that narrative for you or be it through a substack where you’re just sort of peddling your own point of view to the public. I don’t think that, that changes the dynamic at all. I think it just comes across as defensive. I think in a just world, policing would be something that is much more integrated with and responsive to community. It would be stripped of some of its sort of unquestioned power, and it would be forced to answer when the community has questions. It would be in a position where policing as an institution would have to adjust itself to the needs and the demands of the public. And as it stands now, that’s not the case. And I think that that status quo where police are, you know, the law and are stepping outside of and above the general public. These methods of PR, I think, are just to further maintain that status quo, right. Versus a situation where maybe there’s some dialogue, where maybe police understand that they need to work to better establish trust, especially with marginalized communities, indigenous communities, black communities in particular. That’s not going to be established by blogging. I don’t think so. I don’t think they should work. It’s the short answer.

Jordan It’s a great answer. Julius Simone, thank you so much for your time today. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Julia Simone, Rutgers. Writing in The Walrus, that was the big story. I wanted to share a little piece of feedback we got from a listener named Devon who heard a conversation that I had with Donovan Bennett earlier this week about the World Cup in Qatar. Devon writes, Overall, I liked the interview, except for one issue. I didn’t like how Donovan expressed disappointment about how the athletes did not wear an LGBT armband and suggested that one of them should be a fall guy to take the yellow card. It puts the onus of standing up to an entire country and huge organization on a single individual or single team. Overall, he concludes, I don’t think you should express disappointment when an individual does not stand up to a massive organization, but rather praise them when they do it’s. A good point. Thanks, Stefan. You can find the big story at thebigstorypodcast CA. You can talk to us on Twitter at thebigstory FPN. You can, as always, write an email like Devon did hello at thebigstorypodcast CA, and you can call us and leave us a Voicemail 416-935-5935 if you want this podcast, it’s in every podcast player you can possibly download on your mobile device. And it’s in all your smart speakers if you ask them to play The Big Story podcast. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow.