According to the article, the Asheville Police Department is unveiling a new operations plan. It has six planning areas: quality of life, community communications, recruitment and retention, leadership, organizational structure, and technology. Much feedback from a public meeting, we are told, pertained to getting the agency more hip with Facebook and Twitter.

It may sound dumb unless you recall the story from our neighborhood where the guys had the BB gun stolen off their porch. They went after the perp. One confronted him, the other saw a gun in the perps pocket. Some kind of conflict ensued, and the guy who saw the gun called the police. Time passed, and the guy kept posting to social media comments to the effect of, “Where are the police?” If the police had a Twitter page, they might have seen one of the posts.

Something there is that might have preferred a strategic plan with more focus on reducing crime. But who would believe a police department that was supposedly giving all its secrets away?