Bangalore Police has a new informer and it's Twitter

Gossip channels on Twitter in India might be the new rage and some like Lutyen’s Spice or Lutyens Masala  have take the internet by a storm. However, apart from gossip and ego battles, the micro-blogging site will lend itself to solving crimes.

According to an Indian Express report, police in Bangalore are trying to get help from informants who “post Twitter messages about crimes that come to their notice”.

While one tip-off helped the police nab a gang on “eve-teasing and ganja peddling”, another tweet from a senior citizen pointed out how the police were not taking the case of his missing grandchild seriously, following which action was taken against the concerned officers.

Police commissioner of Bangalore M N Reddi explained to the paper why they have decided to rely on social media for information. He said, “Traditionally senior police officials have had limited public contact…Online crowdsourcing gives them a parallel version of an incident mostly from eyewitnesses or the victim."

Reddi added that he hoped this method of tackling people’s complaints will “reduce the trust deficit” that the police face from the public.

At times most middle-class or lower-middle class citizens are afraid to approach the police with their problems as they have little faith in their procedures and fear that they might get harassed as a result.  In such a scenario, social media seems to offer an alternative.  By posting about their grievances in public, citizens can goad the police into action without having to worry about facing the complicated legal procedures or being brushed off by the police.

However, what the Bangalore Police is doing has precedents in the United States of America. Previously researchers at the University of Virginia had demonstrated how tweets could predict certain kinds of crimes if the correct analysis is applied, according to an AFP report.

The research paper had shown that analysis of geo-tagged tweets can be useful in predicting 19 to 25 kinds of crimes, especially for offenses such as stalking, thefts and certain kinds of assault.

Matthew Gerber of the university’s Predictive Technology Lab had told the agency, “What people are tweeting about are their routine activities. Those routine activities take them into environments where crime is likely to happen. So if I tweet about getting drunk tonight, and a lot of people are talking about getting drunk, we know there are certain crimes associated with those things that produce crimes. It’s indirect.”

For the study, Gerber and his colleagues analyzed tweets from the city of Chicago tagged to certain neighbourhoods – measured by individual square kilometers – and the city’s crime database. They then looked forward and were able to make useful predictions about areas where certain crimes were likely to occur – something which could be helpful in deployment of police resources.

While in India, the number of Twitter users who are constantly tweeting is still unclear but these numbers will grow as more and more people get access to the Internet,  thanks to the growth of smartphones and better Internet connectivity.

In such a scenario, it’s not impossible to imagine a lot more people tweeting about crimes that they might have witnessed, especially if they are afraid of approaching the police. And if the police is ready to look at these tweets more carefully, it could go in a long way in building a new relationship between the public and the police.

On the other hand, with the police screening Twitter also raises concerns about the privacy of citizens. Given that most tweets are public, there’s also the question of what happens when a citizen tweets out unsavoury remarks about say a local politician or even an important leader. In the past, we’ve seen people in India getting arrested for posting on Facebook and Twitter. In 2012, a small businessman was arrested by Chennai police for posting ‘offensive’ messages on Twitter targeting then Finance Minister P Chidambaram’s son Karti Chidambaram.

Two teenage girls were arrested from Mumbai’s Palghar for putting up Facebook posts that offended Bal Thackeray’s supporters in 2012. In West Bengal, people have been held by the police based on complaints made against social media posts they put up.

With Section 66-A of the IT Act still getting used against citizens, lot more initiatives like the one made by the Bangalore Police, will have to come up to convince people about the utility of social media in fighting crimes.

With AFP inputs