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Boston Police jump on Twitter

Check this out. It's how I know there was a crash, with injuries, involving an MBTA bus at Park and Washington streets in Dorchester and a fire at 30 Pleasant St., also in Dorchester, this afternoon.

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Comments

I never notice this site before today, good work.

I don't see much activity going on outside of area C & E, in other words, Dorchester :)

But thats not fair, I do think Dorchester has pockets of great communities despite the news.

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That's pretty cool. I wonder if a citizen could eventually @Boston_Police and, real time, have them respond.

I'm thinking those situations where a 911 call isn't quite warranted, but instead where tweeting is faster than digging through the cityofboston.gov/police website on a mobile device, looking for the non-emergency number. (I tried on a full browser, couldn't find it in under 20 seconds--the time it would take me to @Boston_Police)

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...and the "blog" posts are just press releases.

All these guys see is a different way to churn out the same material, not something that engages people. At least the FBI (whom BPD is "following") is 'writing for the medium' with brief one-liners with tinyurls.

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But, sheesh, did you notice that the top two items, about the T crash and the fire, are NOT on BPDNews.com?

I suspect they've just started testing out this Twitter thing, and that's why the previous entries are all just links to BPDNews stuff. The only reason I stumbled across the feed is because I have a Twitter alert set up for "mbta" and this came over today.

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...who emerged from a head. Venus was born, of all places, from the testicles of Uranus. No joke. (although it might make a good one for a fourth grader...yikes!)

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The Boston Police Twitter page *is* an experiment. We weren't ready to go public yet but you can't hide from Adam.

We've been thinking a lot about how to use Twitter to enhance our real-time communication capabilities. One obvious way is to use it to provide updates to followers. And, as Riggssm noted, it could also be used as a way for the public to report things back to us. So we are going to continue to explore Twitter.

One thing that we would like to try is to ramp up tweets during large events like the St Patrick's Day parade or the Marathon to keep people informed about road closings or other things that they might need to know. So, stay tuned.

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"You can't hide from Adam!"

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Sure, I agree, I could quickly see it's a mirror of the blog.

And yet, with this step in the right direction it's easy to forget that something is better than nothing. I appreciate the transparency and easy access to the info, and only hope to encourage more interaction by the BPD.

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I appreciate the transparency and easy access to the info, and only hope to encourage more interaction by the BPD.

There is no "interaction". What you and I are doing right now is interaction. So is when I post a comment on a story Adam has put up.

BPDnews isn't a blog; it's a list of press releases. You can't comment on the stories, they're not posted by any identifiable individuals, etc.

Transparency? They're textbook PR through and through. Officers aren't named, incident numbers aren't given, and the only time they post stories are either to make fun of criminal incidents or toot their own horns.

Also, how is it "easier access"? Typing in "bpdnews.com" too much of a bummer for you?

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Seriously, your posts are just ranting and whining with zero useful content and even so much as just pure bullcrap in quite a few recent cases.

First, when it started, the @MassGovernor Tweets were just reiteration of his website information and schedule updates. A while ago, some people, including RD Sahl from NECN, wrote a reply Tweet and Deval's press secretary (and deputy) have now been responding back to direct people to answers to their inquiries. There's absolutely no way to know if a representative for the Police won't respond if they begin getting interesting or answerable queries more often. Also, Twitter tells you the source of an update, and while many are through twitterfeed (RSS pushing) there are some by web interface, meaning they are being put in manually through twitter.com itself. Those are not likely going to be in the RSS...thus why they were entered manually. So, you're wrong that it's just repeated info.

Second, this is easier access because I'm already visiting twitter.com for other reasons, and now can read the BPD feed by using Twitter as an aggregator. That's easier than going to bpdnews.com, yes.

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Thanks Kaz, you captured my points with 90% less snark than I would have used (snark, of course, being the thing that dilutes my ideas very often).

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Check out the feed today.

Also see this tweet from John Daley about how it's an experiment, and with more to come (not at all surprised to see John involved; he set up BPDNews).

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