@MumbaiPolice is following you

A new tweet lands on top of the notifications page on the Mumbai Police’s official Twitter account. Constable Laxmikant Dhondge clicks. “What action can be taken if BE mech husband does domestic violence to his BE computer wife having 2 kids on daily basis please (sic)...” Dhondge reads out from the computer screen. “What should I say?” he says in Marathi to his colleagues in the brightly-lit ground-floor room at the police commissioner’s building. After a few moments, he turns around and types, “Please visit the nearest police station and file the complaint.”

It is 7pm in the web development room of the Mumbai police and, on five desktops, plain-clothes officials are manning a steady stream of complaints, traffic alerts, tweets and other miscellaneous online updates. It has been almost 18 months since @MumbaiPolice was launched, and it has accrued more than 2.8 million followers.

The 16-member web team, led by assistant police inspector Ashwini Koli, handles the city police’s online presence largely from this room, with officials hunched over screens over 11-hour shifts, with one or two of them handling Twitter at a time.

When they receive tweets like the one Dhondge reads out, they usually reply within minutes. They also screenshot and save each post; noting the handle, the tweet, nature of the communication and the suggested action.

A few minutes later, Dhondge receives another tweet from the same handle. He promptly replies again: “Please send us your contact details”. When there is specific information, the team follows the handle and sends private messages to address the matter further, as this case seems to merit.

In the mean time, another handle tweets to the cops: “Can u plz tell me if u can take any actions on a stalker that I have seen stalking a young lady in my vicinity?” The cops ask for location details. “If it is serious, and we have the information we can call the local police or send our van,” says constable Sanjay Thombre, seated next to Dhondge.

In the early days, the handle gained a quick reputation for pun-infused humour and pithy wordplay. But there’s more to running a 24-hour handle than releasing punchlines into cyberspace.

“Connecting through humour and content is great, but the important thing is resolving problems and helping people with issues,” says Sunchika Pandey, who heads HAT Media, a social media consultancy assisting the team. “The biggest success is that we have been reaching people online and have been able to guide them.” The internet has vapourised the feeling of physical distance and inaccessibility, and the team’s mandate from the outset was to reply to every tweet, says Pandey.

“The response has been good from the start,” says Koli. “People have seen the good work.” Sometimes, when the complaints are straightforward, the in-charge tweets back. At other times, it is referred to seniors. “We discuss it and then reply,” adds Koli. Sometimes more senior officers tweet from the handle.

Most of the traffic on their page though, concerns, well, traffic. Sometimes they receive suggestions or compliments. And there are developing situations as well.

On January 1, 2016 — just five days from the day of the launch — Dinesh Parab saw a tweet from a man stranded in Indonesia. He’d been lured there on the pretext of employment, but on arriving found no job, and didn’t have the money to make a call. The only thing working was the internet. Parab got the man to write an email with his details and directed him to the Indian embassy. Later, a crime was registered. That was the Mumbai Police’s first major Twitter-initiated success story.

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The steady stream of image-based tweets and jokes also helps. On February 28, 2017, when the Oscar for Best Picture was wrongly awarded to La La Land instead of Moonlight and became the faux pas that launched a thousand quips, the Mumbai cops were not far behind: “No mix up in our endeavours. Always striving to paint the #BestPicture of Mumbai across the globe...” said their tweet, with images from both films. More recent tweets have advised followers about cyber safety (“Anything fishy on ur email may be a phishing attempt”), safe celebrations (“Throw colours, not yourselves on others”) and seatbelt use (“Don’t learn about safety by accident”); each time spinning the moral with the catchy.

With its mix of practical information, promises for speedy action and jokes, this handle has marked itself out amongst other police accounts. “We are responsive, so people are happy,” says Sushant Vhatkar, who is compiling the complaints for the day. Thombre chimes in. “People feel the police are listening,” he says. “We are always following up with our followers.”

Bhavya Doreis a Mumbai-based journalist

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