Frank Borelli
Editor-in-Chief
Officer.com
"
One sure sign of success is when people are so envious of you that they can only express it through anger." That was something my grandfather told me a LONG time ago. If he was right then Officer.com has been HUGELY successful lately. Not only have we been challenged by unwanted and highly negative media attention but we've also been the target of a hacking attempt and some other Internet attacks. Since I seem to be the "face" of Officer.com I've also, um,
enjoyed some personal attacks in various venues. Using my grandfather's philosophy, that means Officer.com must be a raging success, right?
Well, we are doing some really cool things (in my opinion). To fully appreciate them I think we have to go back about a year and a half... so come on with me on this quick trip back through time.
Actually, we have to go back a tad farther now that I think about it: In Decmeber of 2007 I took the job as Editor for Officer.com. As such I was also the primary administrative "Officer" for the Officer.com forums. Now, I wasn't really ready for what slapped me in the face, but I think I recovered nicely. The forums, at that time, had about 6,000 people waiting to get into them; and some of those folks had been waiting as much as six months. Within three weeks I had that backlog cleared. Since then, no one has waited more than two weeks to get into our forums. Yes, there is a wait. The registration, confirmation and moderation process is necessary as we do the best we can to keep out the spammers, bots and cop-haters. We're not 100% successful, but can you imagine how it would be if we just let in ANYONE?
So, moving back up to that one and a half years back... in all my time as an admin we had folks asking for upgrades in our forum software. We use a commercially available software program and we hadn't updated it - so to answer the requests of so many of our users we did those upgrades in May 2010. As much as we'd been asked to do that, the moment we did we got complaints from folks who didn't like the "new" forums. Well, we couldn't take it back so everyone (including me) had to get used to it. Eventually everyone realized that the forums had really only changed in appearance and there were some functionality improvements. Life continued on and was good.
Then, in April of this year we rolled out our entirely redesigned website. The end results of (quite literally) years of work, the new Officer.com has a cleaner appearance, better search functions, better related-content functions and easier-to-use (for cops) navigation. We did a better job of social media integration not only linking well with Facebook and Twitter but also including our own "Squad Room" - that social area in Officer.com. If you think of Officer.com as a virtual PD, the navigation is intuitive for those in LE - and a good structure to learn for those wanting to enter police work.
Just like with the forums upgrade, when we rolled out the new Officer.com we got some criticisms. Folks had gotten used to the old site over a matter of years and didn't like having to go look for what they could so easily find before. Eventually, though, they realized that the navigation made finding the content they wanted faster and easier. Our users - the ones who had originally complained - found that the new site layout was actually easier to use and provided more content with less work on their part.
My one (personal performance) short-coming was podcasts. I just never embraced them. Well, Officer.com fixed that. I don't have a choice! Starting on September 8th of this year we kicked off
Officer Radio - an Internet based weekly radio show. One hour long, the show covers various topics and, while I've been told I'm the "face" of Officer.com, I've also been told that I have an excellent face for radio (get it?).
Along that path of growth and improvement we've certainly aggravated a few folks: the people we won't admit to our forums; the people we remove from our forums; members of the public who are upset that we won't give them an outlet for their criticism or hatred. Others...
Let's be honest. The mainstream media provides a more than sufficient outlet for anyone who wants to complain about law enforcement professionals. That is not, never has been and never will be (while I'm the editor) the purpose for Officer.com. We are here to provide you valuable and timely information about topics that are germane to you, how you do your job and going home at the end of your shift. None of us is perfect at it and yes, even though we don't like to, we have to admit our faults. If we can't identify them, we can't correct them. But that's constructive criticism not cop-bashing or hatred. There's a difference.
So, things continue to evolve. More is on the horizon as we continue to improve our service delivery to you, our law enforcement industry audience. If you have some suggestions about how we can do that better, please let us know!
Thank you for your readership. Stay safe!
