Police’s use of Twitter may incur some risks

Twitter becomes extremely popular not only with ordinary Internet users. Today many police departments are using it in order to alert people of traffic disruptions, to explain why police are in a certain neighborhood or to offer crime prevention tips, reports the Associated Press.

Milwaukee's department is one of them. The department has about 900 followers, who are people signed up to automatically receive every tweet from one source. But non-followers can see the updates too.

At the same time, Twitter is risky, as anyone can use the site and claim to be the cops. In fact, there already was a case when the Texas attorney general's office shut down a Twitter account called "Austin PD," which had nearly 450 followers and used the official city seal. The culprit, however, has not been arrested. Craig Mitnick, founder of Nixle LLC, notes that Web sites like Twitter or Facebook are "meant for social purposes and not for trusted information," and offers a secure "municipal wire" that public agencies can use instead of Twitter.

Nowadays, police are tweeting all over, from Canada to such U.S. cities as Boston, Baltimore, Richmond, Va., Boulder, Colo., Dalton, Ga., and Mount Pleasant, S.C. Fire departments in Napa, Calif., Charlotte, N.C., Trenton, Mo., Mesa, Ariz., and Oradell, N.J.

In Scottsdale, Ariz., police plans to use Nixle, but stated they wouldn’t stop using their Twitter account, with about 800 followers. Some police agencies, such as the Los Angeles Fire Department reported it used Twitter both to broadcast and to receive information. 

It is also known that the FBI ("FBIPressOffice") has accumulated more than 2,000 followers on the site. Nonetheless, Special Agent Jason Pack said the FBI was not accepting crime or fugitive tips over Twitter.