Jimmy D.

The use of a pet name to refer to the leader of the internal affairs unit of the Erie Bureau of Police by the Mayor of the City of Erie was the tipping point early on in the continuing case surrounding the behavior of an Erie policeman caught on video and displayed on YouTube. The lack of professional response to the crisis set before them by the Mayor and Chief of Police Steve Franklin during that first interview by the Times-News’s Ed Palattella meant that this situation would have a much broader scope than the outrageous antics of one drunk cop “letting off steam.”

By originally putting the focus on the video author and the attempt to remove it from YouTube via court order, the city has shown that it has a deep lack of understanding of the modern media landscape and crisis management tactics. They didn’t realize that while they were responding with poor judgment when the video was first revealed, that they were already reluctant passengers on an Acela bullet train that would take this story global, complete with close to 60,000 hits on YouTube for the original video so far this morning, thousands more on the copies, CNN and Fox News calling for talking heads, and a U.S. Department of Justice investigation in play.
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