You Have The Right to a Blog

The Los Angeles Police Department has launched their blog.

The first entry from Chief Bratton says:

By using this Blog, the LAPD hopes to maintain an open dialogue with the communites we serve and those who have an interest in the men and women of this organization. We encourage you to express your opinions about current events through respectful and insightful discussion. We reserve the right to refuse to post those comments that contain inappropriate language and/or material. In the near future, we intend to expand our Blogging capabilities to all 19 Area Stations.

While the paragraph above is fairly no-nonsense and authoritative, it does a good job of inviting dialogue, stating intent and setting some ground rules for the site. It will be interesting to see how this goes.

What I find most interesting here though is the fact that the blog is on Typepad.  Mission critical Los Angeles Police Information on Typepad?  I like the fact that the deployment of blogging in the LAPD is using "common" services.  It shows that this deployment has somehow avoided a lot of institutional red tape that one would ordinarily expect.

Photo: US National Archives