Having cops on social media isn’t such a terrible idea: they can post all sorts of useful things like road closures and weather warnings and missing child alerts. Unfortunately, however, it has had some side effects.
Police already play questionable role in society: giving a select caste of people the ability to mete out lethal force and subjecting them to oversight that’s largely the purview of that same caste – but once you add viral dancing videos and horrible pop culture joke tweets into the mix, shit gets bad.
It also means any fuckups they make will get circulated much more quickly, like today, when Victoria Police announced they were on the lookout for “Abdul”. No other details provided, just “Abdul”:
Lesson 1: context. pic.twitter.com/8kWoNd2h3U
— Rashell Habib (@RashellHa) August 22, 2016
The original tweet was mysteriously deleted for some mysterious reason but they did post a follow-up, apparently having a bit of a laugh about themselves:
Except that didn’t last long either, now replaced with this much more professional looking and substantially more boring number:
Warrant for the arrest of Abdul Elabed https://t.co/0U465SZePw #vicpolicenews pic.twitter.com/mR1AWDDGME
— Victoria Police (@VictoriaPolice) August 22, 2016
Hope the rest of the search for this mysterious Abdul goes better than the posting about it part.
Source: News.com.au.
Photo: Twitter / @RashellHa.
