This is why business solutions can play a valuable role in helping the police force harness and maximize the intelligence-gathering powers at their disposal.
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Being a public services organization rather than a profit organization, the police department provides an essential service, but has limited resources and manpower with which to do so. As such, anything that can facilitate more efficient resource management is a massive boon to both the police force and the society they are tasked to protect.One of their most important resources is information, which, in turn, requires significant resources to obtain and manage. However, the rise of social media has presented police with multiple channels through which to gather intelligence.
Social media serves as both a valuable source of information and an efficient means of spreading it. News often hits social networks before it appears anywhere else, and, once it's on the social networks, it spreads like wildfire.
If it's being used by criminal organizations to plan and carry out crimes, it can be used by the police force to detect and prevent them. If it can allow your average citizen to report newsworthy events before journalists even know about it, it can allow them to warn the police of suspicious activity before they would normally have been alerted to it.
Business solutions to the rescue
Investment in business solutions can provide the police force with the means to increase their intelligence-gathering capabilities, and more efficiently manage the information available to them. Software products have been developed to providing business enterprises with the tools to harness social media as a marketing and customer services platform. |
| [Image Credits: www.popcreative.net] |
As with many such technologies, they may have been developed for the purpose of helping businesses increase their profitability, but the tools they provide can then be used to the benefit of non-profit and public services organizations.
For example, many business enterprise software products are designed to interface with social media, allowing organizations to monitor relevant trends. They can zone in on discussions relevant to the industry in question by scanning for increased usage of specific keywords.
Not only that, but they can also identify the underlying sentiments of the people partaking in the discussion. Indeed, the IBM Social Sentiment Index has the ability to differentiate between sarcasm and sincerity when monitoring exchanges over social media.
Designed for the purpose of helping business enterprises obtain feedback from customers and gauge the sentiments of their target audiences, such technologies can be of significant aid to police organizations in their war on crime and their attempts to preserve order.
The ability to scan for spikes in certain kinds of activity can alert them to events that warrant surveillance, while the sentiment-detecting technology can help them determine whether intervention as necessary, such as in the case of a protest about to become violent – an issue of particular concern considering recent global events.
Conserving manpower
Greater numbers of police officials are being tasked with monitoring social media and sorting through the vast amounts of that is data available. Data analytics provided by business solutions can aid in that task, helping to process the data and sift through all of it to pinpoint objects of relevance. This saves valuable time and manpower, which can then be utilized in the field where it is most needed.
Matthew FlaxAbout the Guest Author:
Matthew Flax writes for a South African-based consulting company, whose services include consulting on a wide range of business software solutions, including financial information.
