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In the fight to hire, he resorts to police-directed ads

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Your favorite social network the media platform knows more about you than your parents. Our clicks, like and follow shows models with sophisticated algorithms become a behavioral profile revealing our political beliefs, sexualities, ethnicities, as well as our health.

Now police contractors are using this data to find more job candidates online. Contractors say they have their work cut out for them it became more difficult In 2021, due to the pandemic of the assassination of George Floyd and the national uprisings. WIRED has also spoken to digital advertising companies that work with the police and the police military for online campaigns to encourage recruitment, sometimes based on the behavior profiling tools that platforms use to drive user activity.

“Historically, most of our hiring efforts are done in person with fabrics, where we meet at schools or fairs or organizations,” explained Captain Aaron McCraney, who heads the Los Angeles Police Department’s Procurement and Employment Division. .

McCraney says he started using LAPD Sensis digital marketing company in the months leading up to the pandemic. The initial focus was on diversity: it’s LAPD fighting to play targets for hiring women, black, and Asian American applicants.

This can cause a problem for the traditional online advertising in fact, employers, including the police, cannot target ads to racial or ethnic groups or prevent other groups from viewing the ad. McCraney says the LAPD has traditionally worked with a number of social organizations (such as the NAACP) to help reach targeted groups. But the pandemic ended almost every offline event, which meant McCraney’s team had to find more women and color seekers without addressing women or people of color. He says the ads have helped.

“Traditional recruitment doesn’t work,” says Emma Mae, a marketing specialist at PoliceApp, an online recruitment agency that works with more than 700 U.S. police departments. Among other things, PoliceApp creates advertising campaigns and helps applicants in the pipeline. Recently, police departments have come to PoliceApp with interrelated issues: recruitment is uninterrupted, and new contracts are worn out.

That is, it directs the behavioral and psychosocial goal social networks platforms are included. The LAPD is one of the police departments that handles ads based on identity and non-identity.

Police agencies want job postings to look at the benevolent position and the community, said Dallas Thompson, account manager at Sensis. The ads attract (and fortunately attract) service-oriented, less fortunate) officials who understand bias and have a high risk tolerance. Sensis cross-referenced survey data to identify viewers with social media platform-like viewers to identify traits that police agencies say are the perfect candidate: respect for authority, awareness of social bias, interest in service, and willingness to risk social life. their trajectory.

Despite the unexpected alliance between ad technology and police, the technology itself is perfect for organizing users based on their identity. Social networking platforms invest tremendous resources to track user behavior (both inside and outside) and to notice what users are responding to. They use this information to infer users ’interests and identities, creating a popular feedback loop that directs millions of people to apps like YouTube and Facebook.

Contractors design and place ads that reflect these values. Wendy Koslicki, an assistant professor of criminal justice and criminology at Ball State University, watched hundreds of hours of videos of hiring police. He said police are adjusting the ads to show images of “guards”. To work around demographic targeting restrictions, agencies include women and people of color in videos, she says.

He explains that the videos do not highlight weapons and rarely appear when police make arrests or drive in gang cars. Instead, they emphasize community work, with images of officials interacting with minors at community events for officers, patrolling on foot, and giving lectures in classrooms. Koslicki said the videos often “are a community-oriented department” or “we value working with multiple communities, we value having officials live in communities where they work.”

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