This morning after I finished up playing hockey, a few of the guys in the locker-room were talking about how the Vancouver Police Department(VPD) is now using twitter. So I went home and found an article in The Province that talks all about it. The VPD have an officer on staff who is responsible for continuously updating the @VancouverPD twitter account. So I decided to follow VPD, and soon realized that many other major police departments also are on twitter (Victoria, Toronto). At first I was kind of thinking that this was a bit of a stupid idea, but once I saw a few of the VPD tweets I soon learned that they are actually pretty informative. Alerts on recent crimes that have taken place around the city, areas of high traffic that you should avoid, and even one of their tweets was a response to a fellow Sauder student’s tweet about an event he had witnessed yesterday. I was very impressed by VPD’s twitter account and was beginning to think that twitter was a very efficient means of distributing information for “emergency services”….
While viewing the VPD tweets, a tweet popped up from an airline that provides air ambulance services to the province of Alberta. I was shocked by what it said “Currently responding to a double fatality car accident north of Edmonton”. I don’t see any need for that tweet! I think that people should watch what they say, they could have just said “Responding to a car accident north of Edmonton”. Do we really need to know the saddening details?
I still believe that twitter is a very effective means of communication for “emergency services”, but I think that they should leave some of the “not so pleasant details” out of their tweets.
