Jammed up on Twitter

There’s a lot we don’t know about social media. There’s even less we know about social media and its potential applications for law enforcement. But what we do know is that people love to hear about alleged bad guys beating up, stabbing or shooting other bad guys.

People love that particular rubber-necking activity so much that the Baltimore Police Department has reversed course on plans not to use the agency’s Twitter page to notify the public about shooting incidents after an outcry over the fact that “criminal-on-criminal” violence wouldn’t always be disseminated by the agency through Twitter.

According to a recent article in The Baltimore Sun, for the past five years Baltimore police have tweeted out prompt notifications of confirmed shootings and homicides across the city. The Baltimore PD has nearly 40,000 Twitter followers who have enjoyed getting their crime alerts in real time.

Baltimore has seen a rise in nonfatal shootings of 19 percent this year. When the agency’s Twitter page went silent during a weekend when four more people were shot and wounded in separate incidents people noticed and complained immediately.

The folks who subscribe to a police department’s Twitter feed generally do so to get gory details and scary mug shots. Instead of that stuff, subscribers only got photos from a community event in Northwest Baltimore.

Jack Papp, the department’s chief spokesman, said the social media policy has been revised so the agency doesn’t give out bad information.

“Details can change, so rather than tweet something out, we clarify and then send out to the media,” he said.

In a follow-up email, Papp told Baltimore Sun Reporters that “the department is not going to tweet out every time a drug dealer shoots another criminal in the leg for nonpayment, i.e. criminal-on-criminal crime that we know,” he said. “We will still tweet out instances where nonfatal shootings involve citizens, public safety issues, etc. in real time, as well as homicides.”

And it’s not just “social media” reality-crime fans who are upset about the change

City Councilman Brandon Scott, the vice chairman of the council’s public safety committee, said he was disappointed by Papp’s comment about pulling back on disclosing “criminal-on-criminal” incidents, calling it “inappropriate and unacceptable.”

“We cannot go around valuing one life over another,” Scott said. “The simple fact of the matter is, the department and the city of Baltimore have made far too much progress in transparency to take a step back. We should be doing more with social media, not less.”

And here’s where social media turns into a massive headache for law enforcement leaders – everyone has an opinion. Why else would they be on Twitter?

“If their purpose is to provide information, I think it’s a bad idea to limit that — it’s already pretty limited as it is,” one critic wrote.

The outcry was apparently enough to make the brass reverse course.

“We saw a lot of concerns from the community, and we listened to the community, and we said, ‘We won’t change it,’ ” Papp said.

What’s your experience with this stuff at your agency? Register to comment and then leave your thoughts below.