Over the weekend, Baltimore city police joined Facebook. Now, Baltimore County police are on YouTube.

Typically, cops make YouTube for all the wrong reasons -- the controversial closing down of a celebration after Obama's election; the cop who manhandled a teenaged skateboarder at the Inner Harbor -- but Baltimore County has decided to take a leap of its own:

The official YouTube page of the Baltimore County Police Department with information on the agency's activities and operations to serve county residents.

First up, county police spokesman interviews an officer with tips on how to thwart scams from senior citizens. "These criminals are preying on the compassion of the victim," Toohey says. The video is 4 minutes, 44 seconds, a segment that also appears on cable TV. There are five other videos up and a link to the Baltimore County Police Department's homepage with a message from the chief.

All this is part of an effort by police departments to reach out to citizens -- both to be more responsive (a good thing) and to get published items that the traditional and untraditional media tend to ignore (such as crime tips) unless driven by some horrific event. It's laudible and understandable and necessary in an age when many people, especially the young, are getting their news from various Internet sources.

The question I have is how far will normally staid police departments, and other government agencies, go to attract viewers and readers? Homepages tend to be bland while sites such as YouTube and personalized Facebook pages provoke discussion and wade into controversy. By joining the action, a police chief could make news in the tradional sense, which will bounce right back to the Internet.

So far, it's trial and error.

Case in point was this weekend when the Baltimore Police Department launched a Facebook page by Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III. I got an email while I was at a bar informing me that I had just been "friended" by the city's top cop. On his personalized site, he put up a news release about a bust and added a friendly thanks to the cops. But he had second thoughts and by Sunday the site was down, replaced by an organizational site. Instead of Bealefeld's site, it was, as his spokesman told me, "The BPD Show."

Understandable in that the commissioner wanted the focus to be on his agency and his troops and not him. But on the new site, his little pep talk to the troops was gone (just the standard news release). One was personal; the other was not. Like it or not, Bealefeld is a personality in the city and state, more than any other top cop around the region. I don't know whether it's good or bad for him to promote himself. Previous chiefs, such as Thomas C. Frazier, got nicknamed TV Tom for constantly appearing in front of the television cameras. But we're in a different age, where promotion is everything and getting out front on the Internet means more than bland news releases.

On the other hand, you can write your own biography ten times over for the world to see. By "friending" Bealefeld, I invite him into my world. And while I avoid personal information on my site, many of my friends and colleagues do not, and with the commissioner as a "friend" I allow him a peek at my "friends" -- and many are not friends as much as they are people I have to keep track of for my job, but he has no way of knowing that information.

It's a gamble as to how much the commissioner and others want to open up. A case in point is in Baltimore County, which brings us back to Toohey, the police spokesman there. He has a Facebook page, as does Elise Armacost, the spokeswoman for the Baltimore County Fire Department and a former Baltimore Sun reporter.

Elise wrote on Toohey's "wall" -- a public board -- just the other day: "It was a great batch of sauce. Every batch comes a little different. People think you need hours to make sauce, and you only need about 30 minutes. I like Hunt's crushed or ..."

And earlier, Bill had thanked Elise for helping out with a class he was teaching.

Do I need to know this about two spokespeople for two county agencies? Do they want reporters to know about this? I'm all for all information all the time -- the good thing for me as a reporter is that at some point they might converse about something I'm interesting in writing about. That could be bad for them -- the potential to post something personal or embarrassing or inappropriate is always there. I see what movies Bill likes and what books he likes to read (at least those he's willing to share).

So how about Commissioner Bealefeld -- come back to Facebook as you?

We're all struggling with these new mediums.