So, our busiest police department is doing a "virtual ride along" tonight where the PIO will be riding w/ an officer and tweeting each call that they respond to. This idea has gained popularity recently and more and more agencies seem to be following suit.
I like the idea, but an agency up in Northern Georgia tweeted every single call they responded to for a 24 hour period and THAT is what I would like to see us do here. My reasoning behind that is that the tweets that will be sent out tonight only show activity for ONE officer. We have at least 12 on the road, including supervisors, so the public will only be getting a view of what one officer does for the night and they'll miss out on the other 90% of calls that patrol will be dealing with.
All in all, though, I love the idea b/c it gives the public a chance to see that the officers aren't just sitting around waiting on their call and that they ARE out there responding to calls all night long.
Any of your local agencies doing this??? Would you actually follow it if they did??? I have to admit, I'm super bummed that it's being done on a night when I'm working b/c we aren't allowed access to Twitter up here, so I can't follow along. I'll have to look it up when I get home from work in the morning.
I like the idea, but an agency up in Northern Georgia tweeted every single call they responded to for a 24 hour period and THAT is what I would like to see us do here. My reasoning behind that is that the tweets that will be sent out tonight only show activity for ONE officer. We have at least 12 on the road, including supervisors, so the public will only be getting a view of what one officer does for the night and they'll miss out on the other 90% of calls that patrol will be dealing with.
All in all, though, I love the idea b/c it gives the public a chance to see that the officers aren't just sitting around waiting on their call and that they ARE out there responding to calls all night long.
Any of your local agencies doing this??? Would you actually follow it if they did??? I have to admit, I'm super bummed that it's being done on a night when I'm working b/c we aren't allowed access to Twitter up here, so I can't follow along. I'll have to look it up when I get home from work in the morning.
