Police Publicity and the UC Davis incident

Recently there was an outcry when a youtube video surfaced of a senior police officer spraying a group of Occupy Wall Street protesters with a riot-sized can of OC pepper spray. Of course the first videos to hit the 'net were only short clips showing students sitting peacefully on the ground while the police slowly sprayed them in the face. A short while after there was a longer video that showed the proceeding event of the students surrounding the police officers after some of their fellow protesters were arrested. The protesters shouted commands at the officers to let their friends go and then they would let the police officers leave. Obviously these videos show two very different sides of the story.

What I would like to talk about is not about the ethics of using non-lethal crowd control methods or whether the protesters were legally occupying the campus and the police were infringing on their rights. There are plenty of other places for people to pitch their opinions about that. What I would like to talk about is what steps could the police use to protect their own image in a day when everyone has a pocket sized camcorder built into their cell phones.

One solution that I tossed around was that the police could bring along their own media to record activities during large scale events like that. It would be similar to dashboard cameras in squad cars and even comparable to embedded media with deployed troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. This solution brings up several other concerns, however. For one, if they were actual employees of the government it would place another burden on the taxpayer. Another concern is that if they worked for the government, would they be responsible for protecting the police with their story? This would verge on propaganda and create an ethical dilemma when the police are clearly in the wrong. On the flip side if they acted more as an embedded reporter the police would be responsible for protecting the individuals and they could still spin a negative story for their own gain.

I honestly can not make up my mind as to which is the best answer. Perhaps I am coming up with solutions to fix something that is not really broken as eventually the entire video came out. Hopefully a fellow PR blogger can share some insight I overlooked. Looking forward to comments! 

Below are the two videos referenced in this post. The first is the short video that surfaced soon after the incident and the longer video that came out about a week later.