Mark Zuckerburg’s creation has a new role. Fighting crime in Manchester, England. Greater Manchester Police (GMP) (reports TechCrunch UK) has launched a Facebook application which adds local crime alerts to your profile and news feed, getting the news about crime incidents out there to more youthful users of the Net than is normal for most police operations. Users can submit items via links to GMP on the application, and as well as news items, and even get GMP’s YouTube videos. The application appears to be the first of its type in the UK (I’m not sure about the world, but it could be a contender for that title). Quite who developed the app is as yet uknown, but I’ll update when I find out.
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Mike Butcher
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April 18, 2008
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great idea. i used to subscribe to crime alerts in DC. people would be shocked to find out how much crime goes on right in their neighborhoods, even ‘good’ neighborhoods.
My local rag coverd this story yesterday… keep up TC
Peter, how can I subscribe to “crime alerts” like you describe? Sounds interesting/
Wow….this could be pretty huge and quite useful to get instant alerts. Especially for those who check their FB on mobile devices, if you are in the area and get an alert for a crime that just happened, maybe you could easily recall noticing someone or something. This is quite a smart idea and probably one of the most useful apps on FB right now!
This has some significant civil liberties problems. I blogged them here:
http://infoadvocate.org/blog/2.....forcement/
@3 - http://www.ci.minneapolis.mn.u.....illist.asp, if you live in Minneapolis.
Or try searching for your city and “crime alert” or “crime email”. Or check your local PD web site.
These farsebook posts are getting old.
Or there’s always something similiar that looks like it’s just about to take off, granted it’s not facebook, but I don’t doubt that someone will facebook it…:
http://spotcrime.net
It might be the first facebook app that does this, but is that such a big deal?
There’s a similar approach in Brazil, that uses google maps API to show crime incidents locations, and allows user editing: http://www.citix.net/index/
This is a great example of an organisation that could appear stuffy or old school to have embraced some useful new technology and trying to leverage the power of social media.
It’s just a shame that the design of it and the their website generally isn’t quite so up to date and polished.
interactive videos will be used to fight crime on and off the web