Independent

Just 15 minutes after stepping off the train at Baltimore’s Penn station I found myself standing behind the yellow crime-scene tape after a shooting. We had been alerted to the attack on N Milton Avenue, in the east of the city, via Twitter. In the UK, the micro-blogging site is used mainly by people wanting to follow the thoughts and inanities of celebrities such as Stephen Fry. Here in Baltimore, the police use it to alert the media to shootings and homicides, such is their regularity.

The author of the article excerpted above was part of the reporter exchange between the Baltimore Sun and the Independent. The byline was dated Saturday but he had been in town last week.

If you will recall, last week there was controversy over the Baltimore City Police Department not tweeting about rapes in city neighborhoods that resulted in a general criticism of how they have handled Twitter. A media and terrorism I attended earlier this summer also showed how they were out of tune to the nuances of Twitter at the time.

This post today is not to slam the Baltimore City PD. As a commenter on our last post noted, they reacted to the complaints last week and actually used TweetPhoto to post a picture of a rape suspect. Since then they have also posted pictures of suspects on TwitPic. They have stopped using ALL CAPS in every single tweet which looks good both on Twitter and where their feed goes over to Facebook, but they need to make sure they turn off the Caps-Lock key on every tweet.

They have also started pointing out which PIO (Public Information Officer) is on duty after-hours via Twitter as well as giving media advisories for things like Commissioner Fred Bealefeld challenging one of their PIOs (Donny Moses) to go to the regular Tuesday workout sessions at the Police Academy led by Ravens’ linebacker Ray Lewis.

The flow of the conversation on Twitter/Facebook for the Police Department is still generally one-way and the complaints about that date back to the complaints about the all caps and about them only originally posting shooting and homicide information.

They still have the chance to actually engage the community with their social media platform usage. Instead of just broadcasting information, they should engage in an actual dialogue when possible. There were people responding to them in Twitter before about their issues and nothing happened to fix them until there were complaints that made the media.

The negative attention last week could have been averted before it happened had the people on Twitter communicating back to their account had been heeded. I know they say they monitor Twitter constantly, but I think they generally are looking at that function as doing things like correcting misinformation rather than using it as a way to start a dialogue.