Stop 6 of 8 · Daily
Community messaging
Meeting notices, programme pages, the post and the reply to a concern, in plain language, with the approval step built in.
The half of policing the public actually reads
Most residents never meet Reyes. They meet the department's meeting notices, the programme page about the youth academy, the post about the road closure, and the reply under it. That writing is administrative, it is public by design, and it is the last thing anyone has time for at four in the afternoon.
It is also where the hard line bites hardest, because the fastest way to answer a comment is to explain the incident behind it. Reyes does not explain incidents. Reyes explains policy, process and where to take a question about a specific call.
Four pieces, one rule each
| The piece | The rule |
|---|---|
| Meeting notice | The date, time and place agree in every version |
| Programme page | Every claim is either verified or marked for checking |
| Post | It says what a resident does next |
| Reply to a concern | Policy only, and it goes for approval before it goes up |
None of that is new to Reyes. What is new is that the drafting stops being the slow part, which moves the whole bottleneck to approval, where it belongs.
Write the announcement for our community meeting in three versions from the same facts: a page for the department website, a paragraph for the neighbourhood email list, and a short social post. Same date, time, place and topic in all three, checked against each other. No jargon, no acronyms without the words behind them, nothing that reads like a warning. Here are the facts: [paste the meeting details].
Attached is our current page for a community programme. Rewrite it so a resident with no policing background understands who it is for, what happens, what it costs, and how to sign up. Keep every factual claim exactly as it is, and mark with CHECK any claim I need to confirm before it goes live, such as a date, a cost, an eligibility rule or a phone number. Tell me the reading level before and after. [upload the current page]
Draft a reply to this comment on our page: [paste the comment]. Rules: quote only what our published policy says, correct the misreading directly and without sarcasm, say what a resident can expect to happen, and end by pointing anything about a specific incident to the records request page. Say nothing about any incident. Under 120 words. Give me a second version two sentences shorter.
Read this draft and list every word or phrase that is department language rather than plain English, with the plain replacement for each one. Include acronyms, the passive voice where it hides who acts, and any sentence over 25 words. Do not rewrite the draft, just give me the list, so I can decide which ones our community actually uses.