Metropolitan Tweet Force

I thought it was the case that someone is mugged every 10 minutes in the UK, but apparently it’s more often than that. Last week Manchester Police created several Twitter accounts in order to share information about crimes in real-time.

I followed one account for the better part of a day and I’m unfollowing it now. Despite the huge number of Tweets posted in the last 20 hours, I know only two things:

1) You should never follow an automated Twitter-bot
2) I’m scared to go to Manchester.

All jokes aside the experiment is a great idea, on paper. If you know something about a crime you can reply online and arrange a time to come down to the station and give evidence. To me that’s a nice modern twist on a time-tested method of helping out our police forces.

Additionally if you don’t know anything but think someone you know might, you can pass on the crime’s Tweet to your friend, or reTweet it in order to spread the word.

If anything this shows the genius that is Twitter. It was originally about telling your friends what you’re up to, but now it’s so much more. It’s a whole advertising platform and a great way of crowd sourcing.

Although the accounts were only active for a day they received thousands of subscribers; I’m not so sure these aren’t people just interested in the experiment. Would they stay subscribed permanently?

This can backfire, as the Tweet above shows. I’m not sure all of them are pre-screened before they are sent out, and we all know they’re limited in length so they will be blunt and to the point. But “Drug dealer caught possessing cannabis. He has promised to stop possessing it as soon as possible” strikes me as a joke more than an information Tweet.

Twitter has limited the number of Tweets people can post in an hour or sequentially to stop Twitter-bots from spamming the site. This has led to the police creating eight accounts all starting with “GMP24_” followed by 1,2,3,4 and so on.

This new method of publicising crime could be a great way to alert people on things in their area. Most crimes are posted in police stations, but how many people go and check in there? It makes sense to go to where your target audience is.

I’d like to see this rolled out into my local police force, as that would interest me more. The information is already being entered so it doesn’t cost them anything.

To avoid people naively commenting that the police have nothing to do but update the Twitter accounts, I’d like to see a “Solved” Twitter account-where all the crimes that have been solved would be Tweeted. That might make me want to visit Manchester again.