As community activists gathered this morning on the steps of City Hall to protest the fatal shooting early Tuesday morning of 37-year-old Alton Sterling by a Baton Rouge Police officer, a growing chorus of elected officials, mayoral candidates and political opportunists weighed in with public statements decrying the event.
Meanwhile, national news crews have descended on the Capital City to cover the story, which dominated cable news channels like CNN all morning—supplanting, even, Tuesday’s announcement by the FBI not to indict Hillary Clinton over her email scandal.
It’s a city’s worst nightmare, and it could get worse if city leaders and law enforcement officials don’t act quickly to get ahead of the spiraling story, according to local crisis communication experts.
Already, it may be too late. Reports of the incident quickly spread Tuesday via social media, inflaming residents from Sterling’s neighborhood and raising questions among the broader community. Throughout, law enforcement officials were silent.
“Obviously, this went viral real quick and it seems there was no comment from authorities,” says Jim Harris, principal of Harris, Deville & Associates. “An immediate reaction from authorities would have been important—not that I’m criticizing them—but it would have helped.”
Police Chief Carl Dabadie has set an 11 a.m. news conference in front the department’s headquarters at 9000 Airline Hwy.
Harris says adding to the attention the incident received is the fact that it’s a holiday week and there is relatively little other hard news to fill the news cycle. Then there’s the upcoming mayoral race and a crowded field of candidates who see an opportunity to distinguish themselves from the pack.
“The mayor’s race comes into play because this is an issue everyone wants to be heard on,” Harris says.
So what now?
Ann Edelman, director of public relations at Zehnder Communications, says it’s important for city leaders to start communicating openly and honestly with the public as soon as possible.
“It is very important for city departments to make sure they are not just operating out of protecting their own ranks,” Edelman says. “It has to be very much that this is a community issue, no matter if the officers were at fault or not. It’s still a community issue and needs to be treated as such.”
It’s not necessarily too late for the city to keep the situation from devolving into the kinds of mass riots that followed the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, nearly two years ago, experts say. But it’s important they begin an open dialogue with the community.
“They have to reach out to their key audiences to make sure people are being touched,” Edelman says. “They have to make sure people have access to information and that the information is 100 percent vetted.”
