I’ve asked before, and now I’m asking again: What are the Toronto police doing on Twitter?
Strike that, actually. What are any police departments doing on Twitter?
After the G20 debacle, where policing decisions were apparently made based on tweets, I wrote this piece. It’s very critical of that practice. Listening in on certain Twitter users and using what’s written as a means of investigation strikes me as both an illegitimate and inaccurate form of gathering intelligence.
Take for instance @DrunkSlut, who often tweets about getting high. If the @TorontoPolice found her account, would they arrest her? And how would they go about arresting her? Would they ask Twitter for her email or personal details? What if she doesn’t actually use drugs and it’s a joke? Would they DM her to make sure she was actually using?
Well, we just don’t know.
It would be benificial for everyone, I argued, if the police officers on Twitter stated clearly what they were using the account for.
(I wrote the piece without any interview, because Officer Scott Mills, the keeper of the @TorontoPolice account, refused outright to talk to me. I called, emailed and tweeted him. Not understanding there is a record of all this, he later complained I never contacted him. But anyway!)
This past weekend, Officer Tony Vella, another of Toronto’s finest on Twitter, made an effort to get a journalist banned from Twitter, even going to the extent of contacting a lawyer. His complaint? She altered one of his tweets and retweeted it – an obvious joke. What was he thinking?
There’s an excellent account of Officer Vella’s nonsense here.
Most of this, you could argue, just comes down to officers behaving badly. That part is true. But, to me, there still a number of concerns about police departments on Twitter – and not just in Toronto, but everywhere police use the service.
Here are but a few:
It can be a public safety issue. For instance, in Boston, people are tweeting crimes to the police instead of calling 911. Like here. That’s obviously problematic, and will likely continue no matter how many disclaimers the police put on their accounts.
It can cause confusion. Like in Austin, where a fake police Twitter account fooled hundreds of users during SXSW. It ended up being harmless, but police in that city did not take it lightly. (Come to think of it, neither Officer Vella nor Toronto Police have bothered to verify their accounts, so for all I know, they could be fakes too.)
It can simply be a waste of police resources. Here we go back to Tony Vella, who retweets Oprah, or the main Toronto police account, where Officer Mills tweeted about a woman petting a police horse. Is the public paying these men for this?
I originally argued for the clarification on what the accounts were being used for, but now I wonder if they should be taken down altogether.
If the purpose of police Twitter accounts is to transmit information, then automate them and be done with it. If the purpose is to cause confusion, misdirect police action and threaten other Twitter users, then keep up the good work. I guess.[rssbreak]
