BENGALURU: One of the earliest to adopt to social media for spreading information and dealing with complaints, the city police recently achieved another milestone. They now have over 10,00,000 followers across the city police and traffic police accounts on social networking platforms like Twitter and Facebook.
The Bengaluru City Police (BCP) page on Facebook has 1,83,973 likes, while Bengaluru Traffic Police page has 2,99,470 likes. The BCP Twitter page has 72,060 followers and the @CPBlr page has 3,36,995 followers.
The other accounts of city police too have got an impressive number of likes and followers. City Police Commissioner M N Reddi said that from August 1, 2014 to June 15, 2015 the BCP Twitter page received 6,286 tweets, of which 1,114 were pertaining to Law and Order, 1,866 to traffic, 156 were complaints regarding crime and 129 complaints regarding administration.
From January 1, 2015 to June 15, 2015, there were 853 complaints registered on BCP’s Facebook page. They had 148 complaints regarding law and order, 65 on traffic and 15 pertaining to crime. A 24X7 online social media monitoring cell at Bengaluru City Police is monitoring the system. Searches are done on the basis of keywords and sentiment analysis and social network analysis is done to monitor and act in real time.
A month-long research by Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi on social media accounts of Bengaluru City Police, found that out of the 255 posts made on the various pages, 91 were posted by the victims and 61 were by those who witnessed the crime. The research also found that average police response time was 30.53 hours, maximum time taken to respond was 211.16 hours and minimum time taken was four minutes. For 21.31 per cent of the posts, police acknowledged the residents with a thanks or a response. Out of the same 255 posts, cops responded to 172 posts of which 11.48 percent were on neighbourhood safety issues and improving security in particular areas (9.02 percent). Twenty-two per cent posts suggested that people contact the local police station.
M N Reddi, however, also spoke about the disadvantages of social media that it is limited and can reach out only to IT-savvy citizens. “Twiteratti can be merciless and pan us for even little mess-ups; it is amenable for agenda-based attacks and there is no substitute for basic policing on the ground,” he opined.