Today (Monday 17th) sees the  pilot launch of MyPolice.org, a website which provides a place for the police and the public to engage in local conversations about the service that’s needed and provided.

MyPolice, the brainchild of Lauren Currie and Sarah Drummond, two service designers focused on using design to transform public services, aims to provide a neutral space where the people receiving the service can tell the story of the service they’ve received, knowing the people who provide the service will read it and it will make a difference.

MyPolice aims to assist service receivers to:

1. Find out more about their local police ; who they are and what they do

2. Send feedback to the police from a neutral platform

3. Support other people’s questions, experiences and stories, and share them

4. Rate their police experience and their performance.

For the Force concerned it aims to:

1. Answer the stories, comments and experiences that are put to the force on MyPolice.

2. Provide empathic data to help understand what the public need and want

3. Help forces to hold their own open, direct conversations with targeted audiences.

4. Identify weaknesses and spot opportunities in the service your force delivers.

Tayside will be the first force in the UK to use the platform, undertaking a three month trial. During the pilot, eight officers of various ranks will communicate online with members of the public living in the South Perthshire area of Tayside. DCC Gordon Scobie, the ACPO/ACPOS lead for social media will also be contributing to the interaction on the site.

After the pilot phase, MyPolice intends to be a website that provides one national site for discussion of police services –with postcodes allowing comments to be directed to the appropriate force. Police forces will pay a small annual fee to receive the service.

Asked what success looks like, Lauren is very clear “Success for us is a product that works for the public and the police and makes a difference in terms of service improvement and service engagement”.

Gotta support that.

Related posts:

1. Assessing Police Performance: Giving the public a voice
2. FREEING POLICE FROM BACK OFFICE TASKS COULD PUT MORE BOBBIES ON BEAT – CBI
3. Raol Moat: a template for the regionalisation of firearms capability?
4. ‘Public information does not belong to Government, it belongs to the public on whose behalf government is conducted’
5. Making strategy visual