City police now on Instagram

Will also revive their four-year-old defunct YouTube channel

The Instagram logo is displayed on a smartphone on December 20, 2012 in Paris. Instagram backed down on December 18, 2012 from a planned policy change that appeared to clear the way for the mobile photo sharing service to sell pictures without compensation, after users cried foul. Changes to the Instagram privacy policy and terms of service set to take effect January 16 had included wording that appeared to allow people's pictures to be used by advertisers at Instagram or Facebook worldwide, royalty-free. AFP PHOTO / LIONEL BONAVENTURE

The tech-savvy city police are leaving no stone unturned to ensure their messages spread through the online social space.

After having lakhs of followers on Twitter and Facebook, the Bengaluru City Police are eyeing the images-only stories of Instagram and video-campaigns of YouTube. “There are thousands of people from the city on Instagram and YouTube, and we can reach out our awareness messages and campaigns to them also... these add more channels to our outreach,” said M.G. Nagendra Kumar, Deputy Commissioner of Police (Command Centre).

The city police have seen tremendous success on social media so far. On Twitter, the main Bengaluru City Police handle (@BlrCityPolice) already has nearly 6.04 lakh followers, while the Facebook page has over 5.21 lakh followers.

The police have already earned laurels (and followers) for their hilarious puns and word play to drive home the message of safe driving, against drinking and driving, and helmet wearing, among others. Typically then, the police introduced themselves to the new streams of communications with their wit. “We’re watching you, you can watch us too. All set to relaunch our YouTube Channel” and “I guess we won’t be filtering just criminals now. We’re probably our country’s first Police Department on Instagram.”

The city police were yet to post on Instagram at the time of print, but already had 340- followers, while on the video-streaming site, YouTube, they are hoping to revive their four-year-old defunct channel.

On the future plans of the city force in the online space, Mr. Kumar chose to remain rather mysterious. “The city will just have to wait and watch,” he said.