HowTo: Social Media Crime Fighting

Article posted on Saturday, June, 11th, 2011 at 1:41 pm

ORLANDO, Fla. – Neighbors in a downtown Orlando neighborhood used social media to help find a suspect involved in a stabbing .  Using the Tweet3po platform, which leverages social media and text messaging to communicate, raise awareness and get people involved, neighbors in the Lake Eola Heights Historic District helped identify the suspect who was arrested and charged in stabbing a neighbor. 

But first, they had to convince neighbors that the current Neighborhood Watch didn’t work.  That the traditional telephone communications were not feasible in a modern world.  The began teaching older neighbors about text messaging and FaceBook.  Helping them switch to bright screened Windows Phones, Androids and iPhones, add SMS packages to their accounts, open FaceBook and Twitter accounts and get them subscribed to their neighborhood Tweet3po feed.  This led to awareness, and participation and eventually, the capture of a suspect in a very violent crime.

So, that’s the Tweet3po model:

  1. Start a neighborhood FaceBook page
  2. Start a neighborhood Twitter account
  3. Get your neighbors involved!
  4. Have your local agency (police, fire, etc) post their dispatch data in an rss, Atom or ODATA feed like this
  5. Find neighborhood polygon boundaries or other interesting geographic data for your city like this
  6. Contact US and we’ll get you setup in the system! 

 

 So, it’s as easy as that ;-)

3 Responses to “HowTo: Social Media Crime Fighting”


  1. Chris says:

    Hi I’m from Morningside Park (Florida Mall area). We have FB/Twitter pages and would love to be included on this. How exactly can we get connected to the feed?

    OCSO lists us in Zone 44C: http://www.ocso.com/CrimeInformation/tabid/122/Default.aspx

    Our pages:
    https://www.facebook.com/pages/Morningside-Park-Orange-County-Florida/10150104728275204

    http://www.twitter.com/morningsidepkfl

    Thanks in advance and hope to hear from you all soon!

  2. Dave says:

    Hey Chris, we have another techie interested in Tweet3po for Orange County. Check the @morningsidepkfl twitter account for an intro message!

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