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The Seattle Police Department, which presides over one of the nation’s more tech-savvy cities, is diving into a project that uses 51 hyper-local neighborhood Twitter accounts to provide moment-to-moment crime reports, reports Kirk Johnson in Tuesday’s New York Times.

The project, called Tweets-by-beat, is the most ambitious effort of its kind in the nation, authorities in law enforcement and social media say, transforming the pen and ink of the old police blotter into the bits and bytes of the digital age. It allows residents — including, presumably, criminals — to know in almost real time about many of the large and small transgressions, crises, emergencies and downright weirdness in their neighborhoods.

“More and more people want to know what’s going on on their piece of the rock,” the chief of police, John Diaz, told The Times. “They want to specifically know what’s going on in the areas around their home, around their work, where their children might be going to school. This is just a different way we could put out as much information as possible as quickly as possible.”

Not everything that happens in a neighborhood will automatically pop up; sex crimes were excluded, as were domestic violence cases. Also, the reports were structured with an automatic one-hour delay, aimed at preventing people from learning about an investigation in progress and swarming over to gawk and perhaps interfere.

Although experts consider the effort trailblazing, they say it could have unintended consequences — like making people feel more vulnerable.