ledsSuite Hears Tweet, Tweet, Tweet

Collecting good information is critical for any public safety agency. In the years since officers first read through handwritten notes and letters and listened to eyewitness testimonies, the ways in which people can communicate with each other have expanded enormously. Eyewitnesses and hardcopy written material are still important, but now we have photographs, emails, and other digital media, including the new world of social media, like Twitter.
 

Twitter has only been around since July of 2006, but in that time has become the go-to place for people to post billions of brief, 140-character or less, text messages. These messages, called tweets, are usually publicly accessible to anyone, unless the Twitter user locks down the account. With half a billion users, millions of new messages are posted to Twitter daily on every topic imaginable.
 

So, what does all of this have to do with public safety? Well, did we mention that people who use Twitter will post messages on anything and everything? It’s true. Unsurprisingly, that very broad range of topics includes ones which are of interest to public safety personnel.
 

Here’s a scenario. You are an officer with a mid-sized police department. Your agency is aware of a new synthetic drug which has appeared in its jurisdiction. This drug is known as Molly, but is also referred to as Mollie, MoLee, and a few other variations. You’ve seen the name pop up in case reports, a couple of traffic stops and, based on experience with similar things in the past, you know that you’ll be hearing more of the drug until something else comes along. It would be nice if you could have someone just listen to what folks are talking about on Twitter to help you find out what is going on with Molly in your community.
 

That’s where a new feature in ledsSuite comes in very handy. ledsSuite now connects to the Twitter API to access tweet data in real-time. Since most tweets are generated from mobile phones, tweet metadata usually includes the location from which the tweet originated. As a result, authorized users can configure ledsSuite to only pay attention to tweets from a particular geographic area. They can then set up as many Twitter alert filters as needed for particular terms or even to capture the entire output from individual Twitter accounts. The resulting alerts are routed to specified user groups within ledsSuite.
 

Tying this back into our scenario, we could set up Twitter alerts for "molly” and all the known variants. Because of the geographic settings, we would only get those tweets made from locations we care about. Then, the officers on the Drug Task Force (or whatever group needed to know) would immediately see the Twitter alerts in ledsSuite whenever one matched up with filter criteria. While it is improbable (though not unheard of) for someone to come straight out and say when and where they are breaking the law via a tweet, the tweets which are sent to ledsSuite via the configured alerts should provide additional information which was not previously available.
 

Public safety professionals can use all of the help they can get. The ability to set up Twitter alerts in ledsSuite is just one more way Zuercher Technologies is able to provide that help.