The Manchester Police Tweetfest

Image via Wikipedia

Ingrid provides an excellent update about the 24 hour tweetfest by the Manchester (UK) police force.  This information needs to become standardized and therefore sharable in much the same way that weather data is today.  We are seeing 311 and transit data becoming more and more standardized at the local level, to the benefit of everyone as application developers are grabbing this information and building applications (paid and free). 

It’s been in the news (see this Guardian article). Manchester police have been tweeting all calls over a 24 hour period. It’s been an interesting and effective way to show the range of police calls – it’s not all break-ins and bust-ups. A lot of it is what’s been described as ‘social work’ – ‘confused man reporting his television isn’t working’, etc. My favourite was the tweet that described a call to deal with a man who was holding … Read More

via Policy and Performance

Research on the police usage of Twitter

You might remember that I spoke with Laura Madison back in July, discussing Criminology in The Social Ecosystem.  We discussed her research project, taking place with fellow researchers Christa M. Miller and Chris Worden, which is now completed and is freely available on Scribd (see below).

The research is very detailed and provides a good look into the behavior of police departments, and individuals, across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.  The statistic that concerned me the most was that only 51% of the nearly 1100 accounts surveyed are really being used much, if at all.

What statistics catch your eye?

View this document on Scribd

Want to learn more about Twitter? Check out Laura Fitton’s book, Twitter for Dummies (affiliate link):

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• The Dark Figure Of Social Media: What Can Twitter Teach Criminologists? (readwriteweb.com)