Twitter is fast becoming a de-facto destination for people to know instantly about the events happening around them. Not only is there real time news, but there are also trending topics one can see and explore.
After a recent proposal to provide smartphones to Bihar Police, Twitter India has designed and created a dashboard to monitor tweets that come as complaints. Now that everything is going digital and Twitter is being used by netizens to voice their opinions, it seems like an excellent decision for the police.
Bengaluru Police had created an account on Twitter in 2012 to explore the option of having complaints monitored through the website. However, a lot of tweets come unfiltered and genuine concerns could get lost in them. Twitter India has now provided a solution in the form of an elaborate dashboard that differentiates between complaints and other messages.
The dashboard also automates like identifying the area from which the complaint has arrived, and forward it to right police station.
How will the dashboard help?
At the moment, all 146 police stations in the city have their own twitter handle, and even received training from Twitter India on effective utilization of the micro-blogging site.
Deputy Commissioner of Police, MG Nagendra Kumar said, “So far, complaints came to us like any other post on Twitter. Now that we have our own dashboard, we no longer have to manually forward complaints to the jurisdictional police stations. Everything is automated now . When a person files a complaint, it directly goes to the concerned police station. We monitor each complaint at the command centre, including the time of complaint and time taken to respond and act upon it.”
Firstly, the tweets will now come segregated and will allow Bengaluru Police to effectively manage crime in the city that gets reported on twitter. The irrelevant tweets will be filtered out as well. Secondly, real time cases can be treated urgently and reduce the time spent in other unnecessary activities.
In fact, a senior official in Bengaluru Police has also stated that this move will be treated with utmost importance. Anyone seen being lenient in taking action on complaints will not receive timely promotions and could adversely affect other incentives. Having said that, it will be good to see Bengaluru Police reward attentive and action oriented Police officials that do well in their service.
Twitter India has done a fantastic job in easing Bengaluru Police’s operations in the city. The citizens will definitely benefit from this move, and also allow them to lodge their complaints digitally. Let’s hope this spreads to other cities in India as well.
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Good to hear that social media is useful in efficiently interacting with people. However, for the communication among the government officials including policemen, using foreign applications such as Whatsapp or Facebook is not secure or appreciable. The Cyber Cell of the Indian government should create a tailor made solution for this.
I think you have made a good point. And yes, using 3rd party applications may not be advisable… However, the advantages far outweigh the risk in my opinion..