Crime Prevention on Twitter

For this course, we are using Twitter to broaden your classroom  learning experience. It is not necessary to have your own Twitter  account to participate in the Twitter social media activities throughout  the course. The CRJ305 Twitter feed is accessible from our online  classroom and course credit will be earned by viewing Twitter and  interacting with your instructor and classmates on the course discussion  board. However, if you want to interact with your classmates and others  on Twitter in addition to the discussion boards, review Signing up With Twitter (Links to an external site.)  for instructions on setting up your own Twitter account. The purpose of  this activity is to give you a chance to familiarize yourself with  Twitter and the international social media presence of crime prevention  topics. For this activity, you will visit Twitter (Links to an external site.)  and click on the little magnifying glass on the top of the screen to  reveal the search box to search Twitter. Then do the following:

• In the search box, type the words crime prevention, and click “Enter” on your keyboard to initiate a Twitter search.
• Scroll down the page and review some of the tweets that mention the term crime prevention. Choose  two tweets that interest you that relate to a crime prevention program,  law enforcement approach to crime prevention, research on crime  prevention, etc. Please choose different tweets than those your  classmates have chosen. Therefore, you may want to complete this  activity early in the week to avoid duplicating your classmates’ chosen  tweets.
• Share the links to the tweets in the discussion board. See below for further instructions on what to include in your discussion.
• If you do not have a Twitter account, simply click on the tweet and  copy and paste the URL for the tweet. Share the link on the discussion  board. See below for further instructions on what to include in your  discussion.
• In addition to the links to the two tweets you chose, please address the following in your discussion: 
  • Overall, what did you observe in reviewing the tweets from the  Twitter search term “crime prevention?” For example, which agencies were  tweeting about crime prevention? Were they primarily in the United  States or abroad? Based on your review of the recent tweets (in the past  six months), do you think that the United States seems to be focused on  promoting crime prevention?
  • What specific topics in crime prevention did you find on Twitter?  Were they regarding crime prevention research, theory, and/or practice?
  • If you were to tweet to your U.S. senators about the topic of crime  prevention, what would you say? (Remember that you can use only 140  characters or less on Twitter so be clever in your “tweet” to your  senators).

Your initial post must be a minimum of 300 words in length. Support  your initial post with examples from your required reading material  and/or other sources. Please provide both in-text citations according to  APA style and APA-style references at the end of your initial post.