On April 29, Twitter user @sleepylemur contacted the Seattle Police Department via Twitter requesting an archive of each officer’s Twitter feed. Seattle Police Department runs a program called “Tweets by Beat” that allows the public to follow the arrests and leads of police officers throughout the city. The department is using Twitter as a kind of new age police blotter. Noticing gaps in the tweet history, @sleepylemur tweeted the Seattle Police Department:
@SeattlePD want the archives of Tweets available from Twitter for each beat:https://t.co/QAZsosYfen @jseattle Consider this a PRA req, plz — lee.c (@sleepylemur) April 29, 2014
@sleepylemur If you could please send a formal request to SPDPDR with your contact info, they can get that started for you. — Seattle Police Dept. (@SeattlePD) April 29, 2014
Realistically @sleepylemur knows government isn't quite there yet. In an interview via Twitter, he said he didn't expect his public information request via Twitter to work, necessarily. "I expected they'd say, 'Get thee to a fax machine,'" he said, adding that the department does allow the official form to be emailed, so that's what he did.
As for whether Public Records Act requests via tweet is something agencies should start working toward? "If they support requests via email, why not Twitter?" he said.
And it does make perfect sense for governments to embrace Twitter, because it’s an established platform of communication that people know how to use, said Anil Chawla, founder and CEO of ArchiveSocial – much like the telephone, Twitter is becoming a common, understandable and simple platform that can be used to reach anyone.
“I think social media has become a natural component of our lives,” Chawla said. “I think it speaks to how social media impacts government in general and why governments need to embrace social media and be active on it. It’s because it’s where citizens are and it’s what’s most convenient for them."
One of the best examples of this, he said, is cities like San Francisco, New York and Kansas City integrating Twitter with their 311 help center.
"It used to be a pain, where you’d have to go back to a computer and find the website for the city, find the right number, find the right form, and not many people would do that," Chawla said. "But now that it’s just a Twitter feed, if I know there’s a problem, I can just tweet to them -- and that’s completely natural way for us to operate in this day and age.”