Cambridge Police Department Modifies Twitter Program

The Cambridge Police Department announced this week it would modify its month-old Twitter strategy to share specific locations of reported crimes in progress, adjusting the program to avoid tweets unclear about where crimes are taking place. The department’s emphasis on Twitter, which aims to provide real-time information to the public, drew criticism for providing vague information to the public, causing unnecessary fear.

CPD began releasing automated Tweets containing dispatcher reports of potential crimes in progress at the end of February. CPD’s Tweets, which can be found on the Twitter profile @CambridgePolice, will now provide specific address information down to the 100 block of the location involved.

“When we launched the program, we were only giving street names for the location,” CPD spokesperson Daniel M. Riviello said. “We got a lot of feedback, and some people said that the information would be more useful if there was more specific information so they would no where to avoid.”

“This is very similar to what the Seattle Police do,” Riviello added, referring to the department that launched one of law enforcement’s first major entries into the Twitterverse last summer. Since CPD launched the program, their presence on Twitter has increased around 30 percent.

Now a typical tweet will share a brief description of the potential crime and include a general location, such as 2XX Massachusetts Avenue, according to a CPD press release. Tweets will continue to carry the hashtag #CambMa.

Some Cantabrigians say there are still problems with the CPD’s new strategy. Jeremy Rothman-Shore, a Cambridge resident who criticized CPD’s crime-reporting tweets shortly after the new program launched, told The Crimson last month that the initiative may do more harm than good.

“They say that if they make one person safer with this program, they’ve done a good job. But if they make 100 people scared to go outside with this program, then I’d say its not really helpful,” Rothman-Shore said of the original program.

Riviello said the initiative's increased communication with the public is a good thing.

“Whether or not we’re tweeting these incidents, they’re still occurring,” he told The Crimson on Monday. “It’s just like a police scanner that people have had for years, and that you can now monitor on the internet. We’re just trying to communicate more information.”

Despite criticism, CPD’s new tweets have gained the department not only some national recognition, but also more than 1,500 new Twitter followers.

Additionally, other police departments have expressed their interest in adopting the system. Riviello said that the Cambridge authorities have even shared some of the code that generates the automated tweets with other departments.

“We were happy to see that we’ve gained a very large number of followers since we launched this, which proves to us that people are interested in this and that there is value to it,” Riviello said.

“It’s great, because it means we’re reaching more people,” he added.

—Staff writer Matthew Q. Clarida can be reached at clarida@college.harvard.edu. Follow him on Twitter @MattClarida.