In recent years, police have turned to Twitter as a way of raising public awareness of how much work they handle, with tweets about the kind of calls they respond to on a daily basis. Now, across the Atlantic, police in England have tweeted from court, and not just about big cases.
Appealing to the public's insatiable appetite for crime in all its mundane forms, the West Midlands police department in western central England sent staff to the Birmingham Magistrates' Court for an all-day tweet-a-thon yesterday to give people an inside-the-courtroom, sorta-kinda "Law & Order" perspective, according to BBC News.
""We wanted to give people an insight into the work of the courts. Hopefully people have found it interesting," @WMPolice tweeted at the end of the day. And this, just one tweet earlier: "People are interested in seing [sic] justice being done."
With press layoffs and consolidation ending court reporting in many places, law enforcement has chosen to pick up some of the slack, selectively choosing days to do all-day tweeting. Back in October, the Greater Manchester police department in the UK tweeted every incident it handled over a 24-hour period to make a point about its workload: 341 arrests were documented that day in over 3,200 incidents that had to be spread out over four Twitter accounts to accommodate the information flow.
That day, they tweeted about a 19-year-old man pleading not guilty to assaulting a police officer who tried to confiscate his beer that he was drinking on the street, a 39-year-old man who received a $188 fine for stealing a $15 bottle of wine and a 20-year-old man who pleaded guilty to possession of cannabis and fined $327.
With nearly 6,000 followers, the police department was able to get across to a chunk of its constituency the range of crimes handled in court over the course of a typical day.
Because truth really is stranger than fiction, it's easy to pick out the amusing bits, such as the woman who pleaded guilty to assaulting (spitting) on a bus driver, shoplifting ("smuggling mascara out of a shop down her bra" — as well as aftershave) and failing to appear at court. Her "DNA lead to arrest" and a sentence of four weeks in jail.
In Seattle, police use Twitter to tweet out stolen car information. In Denton, Texas, police tweeted out calls that came into its 911 center. Boulder, Colorado police use their Twitter feed to link to their daily blotter.
A police blotter isn't just for those whose job it is to babysit a scanner, it's also for those interested in knowing what crimes are going on every day in their neighborhoods that often don't make the local news anymore.
Maybe now that tweets are opening up in court, maybe folks will also tune in to satisfy appetites not already whetted by the likes of reality shows such as "Jail," "Snapped" and the true crime story of the week that often fill broadcast news programs.
More crime stories:
- Police: Google Maps ties alleged killer to his wife's murder
- College student tracks down his stolen iPad
- Woman finds her stolen GPS on Craigslist
Check out Technolog on Facebook, and on Twitter, follow Athima Chansanchai, who wishes Twitter was around when she covered courts and police.