Baltimore Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III (at left talking about a drug bust, in a picture by The Sun's Barbara Haddock Taylor) went in front of the City Council Tuesday night to talk about how to best inform the public about crime through the Internet. The department through its new spokesman, Anthony Guglielmi, has been experimenting with Facebook, Twitter and Nixle, a texting program in which breaking crime and other news alerts can be sent to resident's cell phones and emails in their neighborhoods.

During his discussion, Bealefeld also talked about the still-under-review policy of when and how to name officers who discharge their weapons. Baltimore Sun reporter Justin Fenton was at the hearing and here is his story:

The hearing was called by City Council President Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, who wants the city to provide citywide text or email alerts about robberies, missing persons, auto theft and violent crimes (shootings, etc.). But she also wanted the department to talk transparency when it comes to police involved shootings, an issue that has simmered in recent months.

Rawlings-Blake pointed to Chicago, where an independent police oversight commission posts investigative reports of police-involved shootings on a web site. She held up one report that was 12 pages in length and went into detail about what investigators found when they looked into one particular shooting.

Rawlings-Blake wants Baltimore police to do something similar. Bealefeld noted that his staff looked into the Chicago commission and found it had 53 investigators, 11 supervisors and a budget of $7 million. But Rawlings-Blake noted that the commission and its budget are irrelevant - she said such reports are compiled in Baltimore already by homicide investigators and later, prosecutors, and that the only issue at play here was whether to post them on the Internet or not.

"If we're already doing it, is there some reason why redacted reports are not made available?" she asked.

Bealefeld said he endorsed the idea of posting them online but stopped short of saying the department would do it. He noted that many police-involved shootings become the basis for civil lawsuits.

"That's all possible. That's where we should head. I support doing that, but we need to make sure we're covering the legal bases," he said.

Bealefeld also gave an update on the city's policy regarding naming officers who shoot or kill citizens. The department sparked controversy earlier in the year when it said it would no longer identify the officers, ending a decades-long policy citing safety concerns for the officers. Several other large cities do not name officers who shoot or kill citizens, though others continue to do so, including most Maryland jurisdictions. The department was also unable to support the notion that any officers had faced threats after their names were disclosed following a shooting.

At the urging of Mayor Sheila Dixon, Bealefeld said he would re-consider the policy. On Tuesday evening at the council hearing he said that he had met with community leaders and sought their feedback on the policy, and asked them to gather opinions from their neighbors. He also consulted a group of leaders from the faith-based community. He said he received "considerable" feedback but is still contemplating the policy; in the meantime, disclosure of officer's names remain on a case-by-case basis. It's perhaps worth noting that there hasn't been a police shooting since Bealefeld said he would rethink the policy, after a flurry of such shootings to start the year.

Also, on the notion of crime alerts and providing statistics, Bealefeld said he was all about sharing information in new and better ways, but he had serious concerns and in some cases seemed downright paranoid about posting statistics or getting too specific.  Rawlings-Blake said many cities post daily or monthly crime numbers; the department has such data at its fingertips and is shared daily in police stations among commanders. But it has yet to post it online.

Bealefeld said the danger with posting statistics is that things change. He said the department "upgrades" five times as many crimes as it "downgrades," but he said all it takes is one crime being downgraded for the public to become convinced that the department is hiding crimes.

"This police department will not get any credit for" upgrading a crime. "If we change a dot on a map, it would be more damning than opposed to having" provided no information at all, he said. The comment was similar to those he made while discussing the department's use of Twitter, the social networking site, to disseminate breaking information about crime. He said that if police initially believe 6 people have been shot and later determine after an investigation that four people were shot, some will say the police department is "yet again manipulating data."

"We don't want to create problems for ourselves," he said.