Seattle police's twitter of real life police duty gets bad PR
30 Jul 2011
In an experiment that the Seattle Police Department conducted earlier this week, followers were flooded with a stream of real-time 911 information, sparking debate over the use of social media for interactions between citizens and their government.
In the 12-hour experiment that involved the department's 911 centre, the police posted almost all its emergency calls on Twitter, to offer citizens a feel of the wide variety of situations the police was called upon to handle.
Starting 6 am, the around 10,000 police followers received an average of 40 Twitter messages an hour, totalling around 500 by the end of the day.
As the programme got under way without the public being informed, SPD Twitter followers were surprised and sometimes not actually pleased at the sudden stream of messages.
The Tweets covered a range of complaints from car accidents, aggressive pan-handling, suspicious citizens wielding weapons and a suicide call.
The project aimed to give followers a clearer picture of what life in the department was about.
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