How the police use social and other new media ... |
Posted on: 11/10/2013 By: Andrew Spencer
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Crowd policing normally means how police control crowds, deal with riots, protests etc. But it can also mean using the wider community to aid the police in finding people, suspects and so on. Just as there is crowd funding and crowd sourcing there is crowd policing ...
Police forces use social and new media to try and stop demonstrations turning into riots as well as identify those that incite violence (image courtesy rt.com)
But they also use it for crowd control! The police not only use Social Media for crowd policing but for quite a number of purposes. More about that later.
This post was prompted by a piece in the Sunday Times on the 29th September 2013 about the police using Twitter to find Esme Smith, a 14 year that had gone missing. The police had used conventional means to find her, in particular CCTV, and had traced her to London. From Waterloo Station she went to the Strand and was filmed in McDonald’s then seen walking towards Covent Garden. That's where the trail went cold.
Surrey Police could not get radio or newspapers to carry appeals because this was not the first time Esme had gone missing, so they used new media instead. They tweeted to nearly 30,000 followers and that was retweeted more than 1,000 times within a few hours.
The details were put on a page on their website which was visited 120,000 times (average of 3 mins each, which is a long time for any page). They loaded details onto their Facebook page which was "liked" 4,000 times and the page was "shared" by 12,000 people.
TweetMe Please
