Blue Lights Flashing

There are really only three times you gather a lot of First Responders in one location.  The first is when there is a major incident (terrorist attack).

A "Line of Duty Death" is the second event that brings the First Responder family together.

We in Phoenix are dealing with the loss of another officer, killed in the line of duty.

It started with a simple Tweet from the Phoenix Police account at 4:11pm on March 3rd: "43rd Ave and Bethany shut down by #PhxPD. It will be shut down for several hours for police incident. Please choose alternate route."

Grammatically Correct Confusion

I read a lot of blog articles about Social Media in Emergency Management, Law Enforcement, First Response, etc.

Lately, there have been conflicting lines of thought regarding grammar in Social Media posts.

The Advanced Public Information Officer training, at FEMA's Emergency Management Institute, stresses "Flawless Grammar" in Social Media releases.

However, Cheryl Bledsoe (@CherylBle), at the SM4EM Blog responds with,

"...The Twitter community will ask you to provide timely, relevant and interesting information. Accuracy is good, too, although in dynamic situations may be a little tricky. I've heard it said that you can be timely or accurate, but rarely both at the same time. Your community will forgive you for inaccuracies as long as you quickly correct misinformation and communicate regularly."