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services. That's police, fire, water, streets, the whole works, and there should be a way for those government agencies to let the public know what they're getting for their money," said Chief Steve Allender of the Rapid City Police Department in South Dakota, which started offering tweetalongs several months ago -- https://twitter.com/rcpdtweetalong -- after watching departments in Seattle, Kansas City, Mo., and Las Vegas do so.
• On the day before Thanksgiving, Tarah Heupel, the Rapid City Police Department's public information officer, rode alongside Street Crimes Officer Ron Terviel. Heupel posted regular updates every few minutes about what Terviel was doing, including the officer citing a woman for public intoxication, responding to a call of three teenagers attempting to steal cough syrup and body spray from a store and locating a man who ran from the scene of an accident. Photos were included in some of the tweets.
• Michael Taddesse, a 34-year-old university career specialist in Arlington, Texas, has done several ridealongs with police and regularly follows multiple departments that conduct tweetalongs.
• "I think the only way to effectively combat crime is to have a community that is engaged and understands what's going on," he said.
• Ridealongs where "you're out in the elements" are very different than sitting behind a computer during a tweetalong and the level of danger is "dramatically decreased," he said. But in both instances, the passenger gains new information about the call, what laws may or may not have been broken and what transpires, he added.
• For police departments, tweetalongs are just one more way to connect directly with a community through social media.
• More than 92 percent of police departments use social media, according to a survey of 600 agencies in 48 states conducted by the International Association of Chiefs of Police's Center for Social Media. And Nancy Kolb, senior program manager for IACP, called tweetalongs a "growing trend" among departments of all sizes.
• There is no set protocol and departments are free to conduct the tweetalong how they see fit, she said.
• In Ontario, Canada, the Niagara Regional Police Service conducted their first virtual ridealong in August over a busy eight-hour Friday night shift. The police department's followers were able to see a tweet whenever the police unit was dispatched to one of the more than 140,000 calls received that night.
• Richard Gadreau, the social media officer for the police department, said officers routinely take people out on real ridealongs, but there is a waiting list and prefer

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