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Tweets by Beat From the Seattle Police Department

By JENNIFER PRESTON

As my colleague Kirk Johnson reports, the Seattle Police Department has turned to Twitter to post police blotter items online for residents looking to keep up with police-related activity in their neighborhood.

The department divvied up the mostly automated 51 Twitter feeds by police sectors and beats to deliver incident reports at a local level.

As an example, residents in a sector called J2 in Seattle's North Precinct, learned over the weekend about an auto theft in their neighborhood and a “disturbance.”

But updates are not delivered in real time so residents won't necessarily know right away why there is a police cruiser with flashing lights on their block.

To protect crime victims and “the integrity of crime scenes,” the department noted in its announcement that the information on the Twitter feeds appears about one hour after a police officer gets the call from a dispatcher. The feeds also do not include information about sexual assaults or incidents involving domestic violence.

More newsworthy incidents are reported on the department's main Twitter, account, @SeattlePD and might even generate a blog post, as this report did about two men engaged in a fight apparently over drugs and a woman, using a curtain rod and a can of soup as their weapons of choice.

So, how are the reports being received? A look at the conversation on Twitter suggests - and this is probably a good thing for the city's law enforcement leaders - they are not generating tremendous excitement as most of the re ports are of minor incidents. Of course, it depends on what feed you are following.

The goal of the program is to push out information or provide a new version of the old police scanner.

But, as customer service and social media marketing directors at major brands have learned in recent years, it is vital that institutions listen as well as push distribute information. That remains a big challenge for the Seattle Police since beat accounts are automated and the main account is managed by the department's public affairs department.

Over the weekend, Jeff Wilcox, a Twitter user who lives in Seattle and is a software developer at Microsoft, posted on Twitter information about speeding motorcycles that the police department might want to know about. He copied @seattlepd.

But the Seattle Police Department clearly states on its Twitter accounts that anyone reporting information still needs to dial 9-1-1.