Analysis of data from the Twitter account of the Berlin Police for public safety awareness

Nowadays, social networks are an essential part of modern life and they are being adopted as an additional channel for informing people about extreme events and incidents. Emergency agencies actively use the potential of the social networks from the perspective of providing situational and public safety awareness. One of such agencies is the Berlin Police that is the subject of our interest in this paper. They use its Twitter account to inform Berlin inhabitants about incidents that happen in the city. Also, they provide the Twitter marathons and campaigns to demonstrate how the police work and to motivate users to support the police by posting tweets about incidents if they became witnesses. In this paper, we analyze data from the Twitter account of the Berlin Police to understand the public safety situation in the city. We provide the analysis of the entire gathered data and data of two police Twitter marathons. Our analysis results show the different views on the public safety situation in the city: distribution of incidents in districts of the city, distribution of different types of incidents, the intensity of the incidents during the day and others.

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