HowTo: Social Media Crime Fighting

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