Police live-tweeted a drug raid | Hacker News Reader

Police live-tweeted a drug raid

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Summary: Police live tweet search warrant raid for man. Don't find the man, find some empty bags that appear to have weed in them.

Yeah, real score for the police of the world everywhere. Demonstrates just how silly modern police enforcement is.

I'm impressed that they "get" twitter and were able to tweet the events with pictures in a sensible reporter-like timeline.

I'm not sure if it's a good idea to have police doing this sort of thing, but at least it reads well.

First we complain that we cannot record police officers without getting arrested, now we complain when they document there action for all to see. :/

Serious question: who's complaining? I have not heard a significant proportion of any particular community expressing any complaints against the twitter feed.

Edit in italics.

civil libertarians and social justice advocates are complaining very strongly about policies of not being able to record police

Excuse me, I meant against the live twitter feed.

ah okay, got it.

Looks like most of the images have been taken down?

Is this evidence? Prejudicial? Useful? Or is this community outreach and warnings to criminals, that the police are on their way? And the added distraction of tweeting whilst working? Whatever next? Live police copcasts?

Nothing you said there is really bad.

>Is this evidence?

Could be. Notice the time stamps. Nice to have exact times logged on something you don't own.

>Useful?

Kind of works as a radio scanner. I would say neither useful nor not useful.

>Or is this community outreach and warnings to criminals, that the police are on their way?

Really? You seriously wrote that. Grasping for stuff to get pissed at aren't ya.

>And the added distraction of tweeting whilst working?

Now you are just making yourself up set. The supervisor probably allowed this. With an app it takes no more than a few seconds to send a tweet.

>Live police copcasts?

We all complain that there needs to be transparency, yet when a way to provide it appears we seem to mock it. Can't please everyone as they say.

-----

brumpolice Birmingham Police

@Freeman0032 Hopefully the use of Twitter will allow us to reach new audiences and communities with key crime prevention messages and news.

http://twitter.com/#!/brumpolice

This has to be fake.

Going to the department website they have a link to the Twitter account being used here

http://www.birminghamwestandcentralpolice.org.uk/

Two red flags:

* The British Police have their own .police.uk domain space.

* The ip address is used for shared webhosting and is owned by uk2.net

whois does say "West Midlands Police", but this could be forged.

Either way it's extremely unprofessional and will be shut down by a lawyer soon :)

The police in the UK are not known for their professionalism.

Same site with the .police.uk and linking to the same twitter account.

http://www.west-midlands.police.uk/np/birminghamwestandcentr...

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