A great deal of time and energy has been expended trying to convince agencies and individuals to expand the use of social media in emergency management (SMEM). Much of the discussion has emphasized the strategic advantages of engaging communities through these new media. That must have been on the mind of a colleague when he recently asked me, “What tactics — as opposed to strategies — define successful use of social media in emergency management.”

This question caught me a bit off-guard. Like others I imagine, this thought hadn’t really crossed my mind. I took much of what I was doing to engage others online for granted. Clearly, I had learned by observation as well as trial and error that some approaches work better than others, but I hadn’t really taken time to take stock of these experiences.

As I reflected on my own experiments with social media, I realized that I had been learning how to use social media in a variety of ways, some sequential and others not. Each successful engagement, however, evolved from multiple experiences, some active and others passive, all of which contained some common elements. So here’s the list of eight elements I concluded from reflection form the basis for LEARNING to use social media in emergency management effectively:

L — Listen. The first and most important step in building a successful social media presence is listening. Learning what interests others and how they engage one another is essential to gaining acceptance from other social media users. One of the most important ways of showing your interest is in following and friending others online who share your interests. Most social media users find few things more annoying than finding their stream filled with messages from social media dilettantes, so limit the number of messages you send and spread them out so others feel they can get a word in edge-wise.

E — Experiences. Really, nobody wants to know what you had for lunch today. But they just might find your choice of lunch-spot interesting if you have something to say about the service, quality or atmosphere where you dine. In other words, share the experience not just the event. People are much more interested in how something made your feel than what you did. Give them something to relate to and they will come back for more.

A – Ask. Everybody has an opinion, but nobody has all the answers. Questions make us think. Like listening, asking questions gives others the opportunity to offer insights and experiences and shows members of your network that you value their opinions. Making social media interactions true conversations requires give and take. Questions make it clear you want feedback and do a better job of stimulating thoughtful responses than even the most provocative statements.

R — Repeat.If imitation is the highest form of flattering then repeating, sharing and extending the reach of what others have to say is a very close second. Social media demonstrates just how small and interconnected our world is. We tend to repeat and share only those things that resonate most deeply with our core beliefs and attitudes. And authentic, interesting, intimate, or moving images and messages only achieve universal appeal through widespread dissemination across the web of social networks we inhabit.

N — News. The reach of traditional media has become increasingly limited as each of us and those with whom we connect becomes a source of information about what’s happening and what it means. We still rely on others to stay in touch with parts of our world beyond our reach, but we no longer assume that traditional sources and mainstream media have any particular advantage over ordinary people. Indeed, we often trust authentic voices over sages and pundits because we know their interest in a particular happening is personal not professional much less pecuniary.

I — Insight. As noted above, hard, cold facts have their place, but people are more likely to relate to your insights if they shed light on the meaning or impact of an event as opposed to simply offering a restatement of the already available facts. This applies doubly to those instances when those facts are in or of themselves novel, neglected or otherwise surprising.

N – eNlarge. Just as others’ insights offer a glimpse into the meaning of small details we might otherwise overlook, we also need others to help us keep things in context or put them in the proper perspective. Despite the tendency of social media to amplify things that might otherwise seem incredibly trivial, social media does an incredibly good job of connecting us and others to a wider sense of what’s valuable, important or even transcendent.

G — Gratitude.One of the ways social media achieves its mass appeal and ability to influence what we think and how we act is through its ability to facilitate reciprocity. The act of engaging others is, in and of itself, a way of saying thanks for connecting and sharing your world with me. Of course, it still doesn’t hurt to say thank you from time-to-time.

Improving the effectiveness and reach of your social media strategies requires little more than a commitment to LEARNING. We can make better use of social media by realizing that every post, every tweet, every share, every plus is an opportunity to learn what others appreciate and how it makes their world more interesting, lively and rewarding.

The Republican candidates have asserted that President Obama is an apologist or worse, and they claim he sees America as a declining or diminished power. They assert that they see America differently. They would have us believe that Americans are innately different from others and somehow special.

They do not agree so much on what it is that makes us different or special though. To some of them we are freer. Others say we have higher morals. Still others say we have a stronger work ethic. If they agree on anything, it is that their leadership — or that of any Republican for that matter — is the key to making us more of these things.

More than one candidate has gone so far as to suggest he or she is running to save the country. They have asserted strongly that President Obama has made us less free, less moral and weaker. The solution, they tell us, is not just to defeat him but to shrink government.

This blog devotes a lot of time to the discussion of what our national security and homeland security investments protect us from, but not so much about what it is that we are protecting. Is that because it doesn’t matter? Or are we of the belief that we really are different and serve something bigger than any candidate or party?

During the Cold War, it was clear to most of us that we were not only protecting the nation from nuclear annihilation but also from the threat of totalitarianism. Our nuclear deterrent capabilities were arrayed against the threat of tyranny, or so we believed.

If that’s true, we could say that we won the battle but lost the war. As communism collapsed we enslaved ourselves to a corporate military-industrial complex that now dominates us in proportion to the extent to which we have allowed it to define, if not dictate, our productive and political potentials.

As a local public safety official, I spend most of my time focused on the homeland defense frontlines. When I look out at my community, I do not see the same thing the candidates do. The people I meet do not talk in terms of the lofty ideals of liberty and free enterprise. They don’t see themselves as all that different from one another or others they do not know.

Instead, they wonder why traffic is so bad or the bus always runs late. They wonder whether their kids are acquiring the skills they need to compete for jobs in the future. They wonder whether they themselves will earn enough to pay the mortgage or tuition bills. They worry incessantly whether they will have enough resources to retire. And they hope like hell that the problem they called us to help them with will not leave them unable to keep on carrying on.

In one way or another, they know that much of what worries them and others arises from anxiety about the future and frustration with the present. They would like to do right. They know they can do better. But they also wonder whether anyone will recognize and whether it will make any difference. Many if not most of them have concluded it will not.

Most of the work done by our frontline first-responders is now about holding a badly broken system together, keeping it from getting worse rather than making it better. We have no confidence that the market will solve these problems. We have little faith that politicians understand the problems, and much less hope that they will give us the resources and support required to address them properly.

That said, many of our first-responders, like the candidates for our nation’s highest office, have a misplaced, if not exaggerated, faith in their own ability to make a difference. They may not trust politicians, but they do believe they are different and special. They have great confidence that they could do better if only they were allowed the resources and opportunity to do so.

I’m not so sure.

Rather than looking for ways to help people avoid trouble and reduce their dependence on our services, we look for ways of getting more resources to expand our services or make better arguments to defend our budgets from those we deem less worthy of public support. The past decade was a Godsend in that respect. But the days of plenty are gone.

Our brute force approach to solving problems only works well when the threat and the capability to effect consequences are tightly coupled. Our contemporary adversaries surprised us with their ability to level the playing field. We managed to counter their threat, but at a cost far out of proportion to any ability they ever had to make us pay.

When it comes to saving lives at the local level, we know that training more people to perform CPR and encouraging healthier lifestyles by promoting development that favors walking and cycling would save more people than reducing EMS response times, but we won’t support the former unless politicians commit to do the latter. The debate at the national level is no more sensible. We are not only told we have to choose between guns and butter, but also that the economic and political system that provides both of them is more essential and therefore more valuable than the people who provide the resources to procure and produce them.

It is still true that Americans as a whole are wealthier than those of most other nations. We have been better endowed with resources and opportunity than most other nations. And we have had the benefit of many great gifts, often as the result of our openness and accessibility to people and ideas from every corner of the world.

Liberty and free-enterprise have played their parts in the American success story. But so too have access to public education and libraries, enforcement of health and sanitation regulations, and investments in water, sewer, public transit and other essential infrastructure. We will only see America become stronger if we place as much or more emphasis on making these investments as we do in protecting them.

Sadly, that seems less and less likely in the near term at both the national and local levels.

Bill Wasik argues that both perspectives have considerable merit. It’s hard to argue that social media had no influence over the scope or scale of the protests, especially their rapid extension across international borders. At the same time, suggesting that social media should receive at least some of the credit for inspiring democratic uprisings overstates their capacity to encourage virtuous behavior. In the end, Wasik seems to side with Gladwell, arguing that social media enable rather than inspire mass movements.

Given the growing zeal among emergency managers to adopt social media this argument is worth noting. Social media have changed the way emergency managers do their jobs. But the way the public responds to disasters has not changed nearly as much despite social media’s widespread use.

Too many emergency managers think of the public as apathetic and uniformed about disasters. This assumption about the public extends to nearly every aspect of their behavior before, during and after disasters. Social media have helped put paid to such notions largely because they make much more readily apparent the actions of people before, during and after disasters.

For starters, social media have made it clear that people in general crave attention and attraction. We need to be known for what we know and what we can do, and we want to share our time and talents with others whose interests affirm or complement our own. We all possess an atavistic, if not innate, need to connect with others that only becomes more acute as the ways we define ourselves becomes ever more specialized and atomized.

Ambiguity makes us anxious. Seeking and sharing information even with those we do not know helps us alleviate stress. This is true even when such sharing does little to improve our circumstances or clarify a desired course of action.

In the absence of altruism, the introduction of social media into this mix should be expected to do little more than provide people with a platform for talking about disasters. But that’s not what we have seen happening. People inevitably do things when confronted with disaster. Being right takes a backseat to doing right.

Social media have changed the emergency management landscape in large part because they enable people far removed from the direct effects of the disaster to affect its outcome. They do this by giving people immersed in an event the instant ability to connect with the resources of a global audience and share more than just their stories.

Social media have made this process easier and faster. But they are not alone responsible for its emergence.

The one thing that may have changed most with the emergence of social media is the balance between the three competing priorities in emergency management: speed, relevance and accuracy.

In the past, emergency managers carefully parsed the flow of information out of fear that incorrect or conflicting information would undermine their credibility, which in turn would compromise efforts to advance response and recovery. Social media have made it much more apparent that people require very little direction from us when it comes to helping each other cope with the after-effects of disaster. Similarly, they are much more forgiving of errors and helpful about correcting them than we tend to imagine in advance.

People clearly see an important place for emergency managers and government officials as honest brokers, which demands of them an authentic voice characterized by empathy, ethics and equity. These three attributes define accountability in the Information Age, and highlight the importance of social media in emergency management.

Waiting to get the message right is no longer an option. Responding quickly is about riding the wave not generating its momentum. And errors of commission are less likely to be judged harshly than errors of omission, especially when they display relevance, which is to say they reflect a reasonable effort to mobilize or manage collective action to make things better.

Like the street protests and insurgent democracy movements around the world, the past year’s disasters and emergencies have demonstrated the important but not central role of social media in enabling humane action. This impulse arises not from the media but rather from the message. Any fears that social media would combine with Americans’ couch-potato culture to render public responses ever more passive have proven unfounded.

This has been an interesting week for science news. On Tuesday, particle physicists revealed tantalizing evidence that suggests their search for the mysterious Higgs boson is bringing them ever closer to discovering direct evidence of the so-called God particle. Over the weekend, a few media carried news from the other end of the scientific spectrum about an article in the journal Science reporting evidence of altruistic behavior in rats.

The existence (or not) of the Higgs boson has little or nothing to do with theology. You can believe it exists without following the tenets any particular faith tradition. But the finding that altruism is not confined to higher primates, much less humans, calls into question a cornerstone of much of what passes for dogma in both religious and secular society.

Faith and reason alike have been used to justify arguments about the central role of altruism in defining what makes us distinctly human. Any news that this may not be the case begs at least a moment of pause for philosophic reflection.

Altruism is important to emergency managers in much the same way its absence is to homeland security practitioners. On one hand, altruism helps emergency managers understand and explain why people do better than expected in coping with the effects of devastating events. On the other hand, the absence of altruism, call it evil or what have you, is often used to explain the motivations of those who would do harm to others whom they do not know.

Thinking of these two things as polar opposites suggests a sort of binary symmetry exists between them. Some might even be tempted to assume a sort of randomness to the emergence of one behavior as opposed to the other, which ends up evening out the score over the long run. But this new research seems to suggest something else entirely.

Instead of seeing altruism as a hallmark of human-ness, we might now have to accept just the opposite. If rats can demonstrate altruistic behavior toward one another, then it might be hardwired into mammalian brains as a default mechanism for alleviating pain. This in turn, would make the contrary behavior–willfully evoking pain in others, especially when it involves calculation, forethought and planning, the far more exceptional class of conduct.

Rats hardly have a good reputation in polite society. We apply the “rat” label to conduct considered venal, self-serving, conniving and anything but altruistic. At the same time, we consider evidence of altruism the virtuous epitome of humane behavior. The evidence, however, suggests just the opposite may be true.

Rats it should be said in their defense do not conspire with one another to spread disease. Something tells me they would say, “sorry,” if they could, for passing the plague. But humans, especially those willing and able to coöpt and conspire with one another to do harm, often display in such deeds either an inability to distinguish the wrongness of their actions or at the every least a wanton disregard for notions or right and wrong. The sophisticated nature of such rationalizations, whether they rely on faith or reason, strike me as more distinctively human than anything we now know even rats to be capable of.

As physicists continue the hunt for the Higgs boson and proof of the Standard Model, we would do well to consider anew our model of human behavior and how important altruism and the lack of it are to our understanding of what makes us who we are. If acting in a humane fashion toward one another is at once less distinctive of our human-ness and more common to the condition of simply being alive than we previously imagined, we might want to reconsider how we treat the rats among us.

As the assiduous and incredibly expensive search for the God particle aptly illustrates, concerted, intentional human effort reveals a powerful need we have, as humans, to acquire knowledge not for its sake but rather for our own. It’s not that we need to know, but that we need to know we are right, to confirm our hunches or faith is justified. Rats, it seems, are happy simply doing right for its own sake. I wonder which is happier?

One commenter called Chris’s post a fugue. I rather liken it to a comic opera though. That is to say: not depressing or morose. I found it entertaining in the sense that it shed light on foibles we all share.

Chris’s effort follows the common thread of complexity as weaves its way through our lives and unravels them in unexpected ways. His analysis suggests, as Carl Sagan put it, that our ignorance of science or at least scientific principles renders us vulnerable to disaster.

For years now, I have been intrigued by a very different argument about the root causes of the dilemmas Chris’s examples illustrated so aptly and which now confront us in abundance. That view, put forward by Canadian economist and political philosopher John Ralston Saul, argues it is not ignorance of science but a misplaced faith in science or the scientific method that has led us to the brink of environmental, economic, and political catastrophe. Saul is less concerned with knowing (or not) than with believing.

I am sympathetic to both arguments for different reasons. As Chris notes, those who don’t understand science can satisfy themselves that someone else does. Those who do understand science, or think they do, are all too willing to assure us they know more than they really do. So, which is more dangerous, not knowing or trusting too much?

Several months ago, I posted a link to New Zealand political scientist Bronwyn Hayward’s brief video on resilient citizenship, which argued something I think bridges the apparent gap between Sagan’s argument (the one articulated by Chris) and Saul’s. Hayward argues among other things that resilient citizens have a strong sense of and a connection to the natural world.

This connection may or may not include a detailed understanding of plant biology, cosmology, quantum mechanics or physical chemistry, but it must allow for a innate understanding of the cycles of life and death, ebb and flow, accretion and decay, chaos and order. Awareness and acceptance of these dichotomies requires a very different mindset than the one that sees the world in terms of  black and white, good and evil, pass and fail, profit and loss.

Natural dichotomies make us aware that most of our time is spent somewhere in between the extremes, making our way from one point to another and back again. The lucky and happy among us learn to enjoy the journey.

Too many of us though become fixated on one destination or the other at one time or another. The most desperate among us live this reality all the time, enjoying each brief respite at their preferred destination less and less as time passes, yet nevertheless clinging to the hope that something better and more complete awaits them at the end of their next journey.

A few of us are confused enough to believe it would be better to stop anywhere rather than continuing the journey regardless of where we end up. Stasis, or at least the longing for it, is to them anything but a fate worse than death.

The complexity of our world, as Chris pointed out, lies not so much in the reality of the world we live in but the way we choose to embrace it. If we are willing to accept this complexity neither at face value nor as something unknowable, but rather as something worthy of our attention, if not intellection, then we can find solace if not agency in our engagement with that world and those with whom we share it.

As 2011 comes to a close, the world faces many challenges and opportunities. Individuals with different mindsets will see in the same situations very different circumstances. As we wonder what it all means, we would do well to ask ourselves not what we can do about it, but rather what we can learn from it.

To some extent, the controversy (if that’s the right word) about “best practices” arose from a project I am working on with colleagues from Manitou, Inc. We’re in the process of developing a curriculum on social media for emergency managers, and the client has asked us to research what they (not us) have characterized as best practices.

As the team has surveyed the social media landscape we have found a very wide range of experience among emergency managers. Some users have developed very sophisticated programs in a short period of time. Others are still dipping toes in the virtual pond, playing with one or two tools to see what works and how. Everyone, geek and newbie alike, is confronting the reality that their communities have become very sophisticated information consumers and producers, which has forced emergency managers to run hard to try and catch up.

I respect the concerns expressed by some that it’s too soon to call something best practice. We certainly risk ridicule if we recognize efforts by the public sector that are still primitive, if not poorly executed, by private sector standards. Even the best efforts will struggle to stay on top in the rapidly shifting sea of social media swirling around us today.

This leaves us on the horns of a dilemma. Where do we turn then for advice and examples? What then should we rely upon to judge the quality of our efforts? If we’re really committed to continuous improvement, how can we measure our progress if we can’t even establish where we’re starting from?

For starters, I agree with several commentators, including Cheryl Bledsoe, that we should start with the basics. What are we trying to accomplish with our social media strategies? Will social media help us deliver better service, improve outcomes or encourage broader participation? And is social media better than alternative means of achieving these ends?

Despite my agreement with this argument, I think the evidence already exists to say the answer to most of these questions, in most instances, is unquestionably, “Yes!” How do we know? First and foremost, almost everyone we have reached out to with any experience using social media in emergency management has made it clear that these tools have several powerful advantages over other approaches: low cost, ease of use, accessibility, and scalability.

Emergency management has benefitted from federal investments in homeland security and preparedness since 9/11. But few of these investments have achieved such widespread adoption or secured as high a degree of community engagement as social media has in the same time period.

It might help to pause here and summarize what the Manitou team has learned so far that’s worth sharing, if not emulating:

• Social media enhances situational awareness by amplifying the voices of disaster survivors and making their messages accessible to responders;
• Social media helps emergency managers overcome the limitations of NIMS/ICS by encouraging coordination, cooperation, and collaboration among responders and with their communities;
• Social media facilitates and encourages participation by providing ordinary people with access to powerful platforms for collecting and sharing emergency information;
• Social media empowers and enables survivors to meet needs beyond the scope or reach of emergency managers and other responders;
• Social media mobilizes resources by allowing people outside the affected area to lend support without impacting the efforts of on-scene responders; and
• Social media allows people to engage one another with empathy.

Although social media has only been on the scene for a short time, we have found compelling examples of good practice associated with every phase of the emergency management process and across many more functions than public information and public affairs. This finding alone merits further exploration.

Almost to a person, those we interviewed started their social media initiatives without official endorsement or sanction. They operated outside the system to make the system better. In the process, they discovered surprisingly quickly that social media makes every element of emergency management more effective by making information and the means of sharing it more easily accessible to everyone. If, as Cheryl Bledsoe suggests, best practices should reflect a certain kind of stability reflected by the ability of a technique to produce consistent results, it would be hard to ignore this fact.

Many of those who initially embraced social media saw it as a more direct and efficient means of communicating messages to the public. But again almost every one of them quickly discovered it can be just as powerful a way of gathering information as spreading it. This too seems like a fact that is difficult to  ignore.

Best practices need not be complicated and should not be intimidating. But they must be valuable and replicable. The simple fact is that best practice in social media for emergency management, at least for the time-being, consists of at least two truths: 1) making information sharing easier and more accessible to everyone improves outcomes and 2) recognizing that the information produced when social media are employed is available to anyone and its effective use is what matters most.

We can wait for measures of their effectiveness to recognize these results. But that may mean missed opportunities. Someone much wiser than me once said, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”

As I’ve reflected on these concerns, I’ve come to the conclusion that officials have good cause for concern. Likewise, the public has even better cause to keep pressing its case for more and better engagement by public officials through social media.

Despite the persistent decline of public trust and confidence, or perhaps because of it, the public has increasingly come to expect access. Access to government information. Access to government services. And access to government officials.

In an era when the Supreme Court of the United States equates campaign contributions with free speech and concludes that corporations have the same rights as individuals, its easy to see why people feel so strongly that access should not be restricted to the few who can afford it.

Traditionally, the legitimacy of government officials’ actions have rested on three pillars:

• Authority
• Accuracy
• Accountability

Authority typically takes the form of legal mandates and budgets. Accuracy reflects the presumed rightness of actions judged according to their conformity with the strict limits of statutory authorizations and appropriation limits. Accountability is something largely exercised by political and judicial authorities over executive officials, and too often reflects popular will rather than the public weal.

The ability of social media to democratize civil discourse provokes anxiety among  public officials who fear that accountability to everybody means accountability to anybody. (Oddly enough, no one has expressed a fear that this could lead to accountability to nobody, which I still reckon is one of the possibilites.) These fears may be justified. Complaints that could once be dismissed as narrow interest group politics are no longer restricted to the usual suspects with enough time or money to attend public meetings.

Cops can now expect every action they conduct in public to be recorded by somebody and shared with everybody in minutes. Transportation officials can expect on-the-spot traffic reports from anybody annoyed by delays clearing snow. Building code officials can expect complaints about surly or incompetent inspectors to be communicated to other contractors instantly. Transit operators can expect riders to report rude operators and late-running trains. And health officials can hear about the fly in somebody’s soup while the diner’s still seated at the table and telling the server about it.

With few exceptions, these observations and antipathies are nothing new. What’s new and different is the ability to attract an audience. And more often than not this audience extends well beyond the few people a message might be aimed at influencing.

So far, fears that such open access would lead to something approaching anarchy have proven anything but realistic. To be sure, social media has proven itself a powerful organizing force among protestors aligned with the Occupy Wall Street movement. But it has also proven equally adept at affording the movement’s antagonists and opponents a platform too. (Isn’t this what the framers expected?)

As the flow of information accompanying the clearance of Occupy encampments has illustrated, efforts to spread disinformation have been widespread. But the truth has come through clearly enough to anybody willing to pay attention and apply a healthy dose of skepticism to their analysis of who’s saying what.

If those outside government see in social media the promise of access, and with that the democratization of accountability, then public officials should see in social media the promise of awareness that can expand the legitimacy of their authority by safeguarding the accuracy of their actions.

Time and again, interviews I’ve conducted with local officials have demonstrated that the real value of social media to those who have already adopted it comes from acquiring a broader and deeper understanding of what’s going on in their communities. The voices of real people speaking in real-time may not be any louder than those of lobbyists and the other monied interests who have typically monopolized the public discourse. But they do have an unmistakable authenticity that resonates with any official who still believes it’s their job to serve the public interest.

A few weeks ago, when I followed Chris Bellavita’s lead and began considering what the Occupy protests might portend for public safety and homeland security, I questioned what we could count on police officers and firefighters to do in the face of mounting public unrest and pressure to restore the status quo ante. My question was predicated on two observations: 1) Many cops and firefighters feel just as alienated and fearful in the current economic climate as many of the protestors do and 2) cops and firefighters, despite their relatively favored standing in public opinion have garned little public support as they have confronted job cuts, threats to collective bargaining rights and the looming prospects pension reform and benefit reductions.

Over the past few days, my questions have been answered. Cops and firefighters in city after city have seen fit to faithfully follow instructions and act against protestors, often upon the slimmest pretexts. Take for instance the characterization of Zuccotti Park and other Occupy encampments as threats to health and safety. In several instances, this was predicated at least in part on the operation of gasoline generators to produce electric power. The exhaust fumes were deemed hazardous sources of the toxic combustion gas carbon monoxide. The hot exhausts and fuel cans were also considered fire hazards. The close quarters in which these operations were conducted was said to compound these risks.

Now let’s consider what usually happens when fire inspectors find such conditions: Essentially nothing. You see, the model fire prevention codes adopted in nearly very city and state in the country, including post-9/11 New York City, do not address these hazards directly in such an environment. They simply do not envision such circumstances or call them out as dangerous. As such, the fire inspectors had to conclude based on the “professional judgment and opinion” that these conditions constituted a danger to life per se.

I’ve spent nearly all of my professional career crafting, interpreting or applying these codes, and I can say with complete confidence that this opinion is both baseless and unwarranted. That is unless you consider the intense political pressure fire officials must have been under to give the mayor and police commissioner the requisite pretext for acting against the occupation.

It saddens me to say this, by I find such behavior sorry and shameful. I reach this conclusion in substantial part because such action is so unprecedented even when it is clearly warranted. A case in point: No action was taken to suspend operations or seize private property in the Deutsche Bank Building when inspectors became aware of dangerous conditions during its demolition following the 9/11 attacks. Two firefighters sent to combat a fire there in August 2007 died, and 46 more suffered serious, career-ending injuries because of confusing and obstructed exit paths, failure to maintain firefighting features, and the use of high flame-spread materials and uncontrolled heat sources during asbestos removal operations. These conditions conspired to allow an otherwise minor fire started by discarded smoking materials  to spread through 10 floors before it was controlled.

In the aftermath of this fire, two very telling truths emerged. First, despite permit conditions that required inspections at least once every 15 days, city authorities had failed to conduct any recorded inspections of the demolition operation between March 2007 and the date the fire occurred.  Second, the city enabled if not facilitated the contractor’s malfeasance by taking a laissez faire approach to overseeing demolition operations despite repeated warnings a disaster could result. (I use the term “malfeasance” advisedly: The demolition contractor- employed by the Lower Manhattan Development Authority–the ironically named John Galt Corporation–was found guilty of reckless endangerment in 2009, although construction supervisors employed by the company were acquitted of involuntary manslaughter charges.)

If inspectors can so willingly look away in the face of clearly dangerous conditions like those present at Deutsche Bank, what makes them so eager to see fire hazards in Zuccotti Park when no such violations exist in fire codes? Is it possible they fear the fate of so many others who are now unemployed if they fail to accede to their superiors’ expectations?

I am reluctant to answer these questions, but I don’t mind asking them of those who made these decisions. In the end, the questions in play here are the same timeless ones we all face when values and principles collide: Who or what do you serve? Who or what are you protecting?

Several theorists suggest that trust and confidence is an important prerequisite of democracy legitimacy. But practitioners know the absence of trust is often a prime mover among the disaffected who show up at public meetings to influence officials. It should come as no surprise then that the more involved someone is in the political and administrative processes of government, the more likely they are to have trust and confidence in the outcome of public processes and those who make them.

Most of the distrust in government and public officials stems from the sense that these individuals and institutions are increasingly removed from the experiences of those they serve and the effects of the decisions they make. Firefighters, teachers, nurses, and cops often enjoy public approval ratings far higher than politicians because they have intimate contact with people, and those with whom they come into contact have little or no understanding of what they actually do or how they do it. As such, routine exposure to the good works of public officials does not necessarily translate into public support much less political power.

This begs the question then, what is public trust and confidence good for and how can public officials, especially homeland security practitioners, build it and use it to achieve important public purposes? For starters, we should recognize that what people say they want and what these desires mean often requires clarification.

I work in the fire service, where people often express their expectations of us as follows:

Speed – get there quickly.

Relevance – do the right thing.

Accuracy – do things right.

I imagine that these same expectations apply to many other aspects of the homeland security enterprise. Who wouldn’t like to get through passenger screening at the airport quickly, while knowing that the screening procedures were both the minimum necessary as well as sufficient to prevent any acts of terrorism from occurring?

When questions or controversies arise surrounding our service, however, it become clearer that people understand that these expectations come at a cost, and their desire for each is more or less elastic depending upon their situation and the circumstances attending their need for service. Over the years, it has become clearer to me that people assess our performance and detect deviations from their expectations a little differently than they usually express them:

Speed –> consistency, dependability – showing up at all is just as important as getting there quickly.

Relevance –> coherence, quality – actions other than the expected are acceptable when they are based on sound reasoning.

Accuracy –> compassion – whether a decision or action is acceptable depends upon how it makes people feel.

These days people are increasingly surprised to get any response at all, much less a quick one. Knowing that someone will show up every time they need help has become every bit as important as knowing that such help will come quickly. People need to know they can depend upon government to try, even if it comes up short sometimes. Inconsistency lends itself to the impression of undependability, even when the lack of responsiveness in some circumstances leads to faster responses in others.

When performance deviates from expectations, people look to experts for understanding. They need to know that the actions fit the circumstances, and they often judge this in one of two ways: 1) by how hard people are trying and 2) by whether things get better or at the very least stop getting worse. It matters very little to those watching whether the actions they observe have a direct effect on the outcome so long as they can see people making an effort. If things get better or stop getting worse, they naturally assume that the result arises from the actions undertaken.

Even if things end badly, people often judge the quality of the outcome and its appropriateness by how those engaged in the effort made them feel. People understand implicitly that when things start badly they often end badly. But they also appreciate it when those who respond to remedy the effects of their errors avoid the temptation to find fault, allocate blame or pass judgment, especially without learning all the facts first.

I have translated these observations about public expectations into three fairly simple and straightforward statements to guide operations where I work:

We always show up! We are there for each other and our community when they need us.

We take decisive action to make things better. We are neither spectators nor observers. We take reasonable risks to achieve appropriate results and accept responsibility for all of our actions.

We engage everyone with compassion and respect. We treat people they way we want to be treated. We seek understanding by looking at ourselves and the situations we face the way others see us.

I cannot tell you that this approach will transform public opinion or translate into broad public approval or political support for our agency or its actions. But I  can say with confidence that taking this approach makes me feel better about what we do and how we do it. More importantly, it speaks to why wo do what we do: We serve the public for their sake not our own.