Officer Tracy Gonzalez, SAPD's Tech-Savvy Social Media Strategist

“It was April Fools’ Day,” she says reflectively, noting the holiday time marker as an aid to pinpoint the date. “April 1, 2006 was my hire date.” And even though she’d always really known the direction she wanted to take, life had other plans for Tracy Gonzalez.

“I grew up in southern California,” Gonzalez said. “Around the time where I was going to high school and really trying to make the decision of what career path I wanted to go towards, when I discussed law enforcement with my family, it was a ‘no’. We had things going on at that time in LAPD that were horrible,” she said, mentioning violence, O.J. Simpson and Rodney King as examples. “My family was just like ‘absolutely not, you’re not going into law enforcement.’”

While in high school, Gonzalez’s grandmother needed to have tests run at a local hospital, so she escorted her to the medical center. Having had an interest in medicine, Gonzalez was familiar with medical terminology and began posing questions to the technician. After a short discourse, he asked ‘Where are you a nurse?’ With that, the doors opened to a new career.

“I ended up coming and spending a couple of days at the hospital with the technologist and just sort of shadowed them,” Gonzalez explains. “I was hired right out of high school, I was trained by that ultra sound company, and that’s what I did.”

Gonzalez worked for the company for a couple of years until she became pregnant with her daughter, who is now 20. While on maternity leave, a natural disaster shook the San Fernando Valley and devastated the area Gonzalez had been living in. In an interview, Gonzalez describes her first reactions as the 1994 Northridge Earthquake hit.

“It was horrible,” Gonzalez says, with a noticeable tinge of anxiety rising in her voice. “It actually threw me out of a king-sized bed. Growing up in the valley, we were very familiar with earthquakes. I had been through many a earthquake in my day…this was unlike any earthquake I had ever experienced…my initial reaction, my initial feeling was ‘oh my god, we’re being bombed!’”

Crawling on her bedroom floor and down to her baby’s room, Gonzalez went into mother mode. The floors were carpeted, but magnitude of the shake had sent the baby’s crib rolling to the opposite wall on casters. With her first child in her arms, she made her way to the dining room where she bundled the baby in blankets under the table, then made her way on hands and knees to the kitchen to collect essentials such as formula and water.

“Everything had come out—if it was in a cupboard and it was breakable, it had come out and was shattered,” she remembers. “I didn’t realize it until the next day, that I had little pieces of glass in my legs and my knees from crawling. You know, you don’t feel it, because you’re in mom mode.”

Having salvaged basic provisions, Gonzalez scooped up her baby and made her way down the stairs, praying with each step that the aftershock wouldn’t come until she’d reached the bottom.

“That was what kind of changed my direction,” Gonzalez said. “I didn’t go back to work. We couldn’t live in the building where I lived, so we ended up moving,” she says, explaining that the zone had been declared a disaster area. “Picture overpasses—like on the loop—just on the ground. Bridges collapsed, apartment buildings crumbling—there were some areas of the valley that looked like a war zone.”

While the area she’d grown up in was being re-constructed, Gonzalez was also making a change. She had always had an interest in hair and make-up and soon acquired her cosmetology license. She was doing hair full time when she met her husband, who was in the Army, and the two moved to Ft Louis, Wash., where he had been stationed.

The Gonzalez family lived in Washington for four to five years, and Tracy soon gave birth to her second child, a boy who has just turned 15. Gonzalez remembers the time spent in Washington fondly, recalling beautiful scenery and a plethora of outdoor activities.

“It was probably the most beautiful place I’ve ever lived,” she said. “When I go back to visit, I am a different person. I have no stress. The trees, the forest, the water, the wildlife there is just amazing. It’s just such an amazing, amazing place.”

Beautiful as it was, new orders for Gonzalez’s husband meant the family had to move on, this time to wintry Alaska, where the family remained until 2004. Gonzalez describes the climate change as difficult, having grown up on the beaches of southern California.

“I moved to Alaska in late winter and I remember thinking, ‘I think I moved to a different planet,’” she says. “It was miserably cold, it was dark all the time…the longest day of winter there’s 22 hours of darkness and maybe two hours of what we would call dusk,” and the summer was the exact opposite. “The summertime up there is amazing. It’s the flipside to the darkness. People would be barbequing at 2-3 o clock in the morning, playing softball, because it’s light outside. I don’t think I ever truly adjusted to it,” she said.

From Alaska, the family uprooted one final time in 2004, this time to San Angelo where her husband was stationed at Goodfellow Airforce Base. Having spent the last several years as a hair stylist, Gonzalez found that although she enjoyed her work, she was meant to do something different. With both kids in school, Gonzalez discussed law enforcement with her family and decided to apply at the SAPD.  

“Growing up, I was one of those kids where the cops were at the house a lot,” she says, but, “I was never afraid of them. I remember when the police would come to our home I would like ‘Okay, things are going to be okay,’” Gonzalez continues, letting out a sigh of relief for emphasis. “As I grew up, I wanted to be a police officer. I wanted to be able to help people, protect kids. I thought it would be exciting.”

While she was in high school, Tracy Gonzalez had taken an elective to be an office aid for School Resource Officers. She says she remembers back then thinking that the job would be the closest she would ever get to working in law enforcement herself.

“I remember thinking about their relationship with teenagers, and how just your attitude toward the public can really make an impact and an impression, so that made me want to do it more,” she said. And on April Fools’ Day 2006, she was hired at the San Angelo Police Department.

Today, Gonzalez is an officer at heart as much as she is an officer in uniform. But really, that’s something she’s always been. Hearing her speak of her job in the SAPD’s Community Services building is almost like hearing Steve Jobs make a presentation about the latest iPhone—she genuinely loves what she does and she’s well versed with apps.

The PD’s secondary Public Information Officer and Social Media Strategist, Gonzalez does a lot of work behind the scenes, disseminating the messages of the department to the public and initiating conversation within the community.

“If we have a message, and we have information to share, why aren’t we sharing it?” Gonzalez takes point. “If we want to start talking to people, we’ve got to start talking to people. Social media means it’s a dialog, not a monologue. So I proposed [to the Chief] ‘Hey, what do you think about doing Facebook and Twitter?’”

That conversation took place in 2009, and since then, the City of San Angelo Police Department’s social network has increased by 9,312 “likes” and seen the addition of a YouTube channel, Nixle and a Pinterest account. The PD has also set up Blue Watch groups—modern-day, online versions of Neighborhood Watch—and is currently developing a crime map that will update daily with all instances of property crimes throughout the city.

The real exciting part, however, is watching the community respond to information passed through social media channels and react live, Gonzalez says. “Many times, this is what happens, and this is the exciting part for me, I get like a kid,” she begins. “I’ll send out that press release that has…the link to our YouTube video. Within minutes you’ll see people are reading your story, people are watching that video on YouTube, and then you wait for the tips to come in. The first tip will come in and you’ll get a name,” she says. “Then you wait, and you get a second tip and it might be the same name…You know when you see that pattern of names that you’ve got something pretty good.”

According to Gonzalez, the evidence of social media’s effectiveness may be seen in the number of solved cases. Although the videos and wanted posters are generally reserved for cases where there are no leads, there have been several major crimes solved with the aid of the general public and the department’s communication via social media channels.

In one such case, a pair of criminals who had seen their photos surface on social media sites on Oct. 23 titled “Need to Identify” turned themselves in within days. A subsequent press release states that tips began streaming in within an hour of the posts and that all of those depicted in the images attached had been identified.

Running the online aspect is for many departments a full-time effort moderated by a communications team. In San Angelo, Officer Gonzalez is that team, a duty she fulfills alongside writing press releases, taking media inquiries, updating the department’s website and other requirements. Although it’s a one-woman operation, Lt. Mike Hernandez says San Angelo’s social media strategy is a role model for others in the state and worldwide.

“I do periodically get contacted from other agencies in the state just for advice or direction on how to set things up,” Gonzalez says. “I’ve participated in Google Hangouts with law enforcement that speak to different agencies that they utilize social media for their communities, some of them would be from Canada, the Netherlands, some from Australia, different parts of the U.S.”

Since starting roughly eight years ago, Gonzalez says she’s never regretted making the decision to start her third and destined career. She’s grown into the position as a liaison to the community, and emphasizes the importance of fostering communication between the PD and the public.

“Public safety is a partnership, and any agency that doesn’t see the significance and the value in their citizens in helping them do our job, they’re missing it,” she said. “They don’t get it.”

Currently, Officer Gonzalez is working on developing an interactive crime map illustrating daily property crimes throughout the city. She’s also pushing a campaign of awareness on internet and cell phone safety and responsibility, noting an increasing number of local cases where self-shot photos of teens sent via SnapChat, MMS and social networking sites are causing serious repercussions and leading to permanent digital chains on the internet.