London’s Metropolitan Police Service began tweeting the location of its helicopters in 2012. (Courtesy of Metropolitan Police Service Air Support Unit)

I’ve become fascinated with a Twitter feed called @MPSintheSky. MPS stands for Metropolitan Police Service. That’s the law enforcement outfit that covers 7.2 million people in London. This Twitter feed keeps Londoners informed about the comings and goings of the police department’s helicopter fleet. The tweets include things like this:

Garden search following an attempted burglary in Enfield.

Assisting firearms officers searching for a male with a firearm in Greenford. Suspect located and detained!

Searching open grounds in Hillingdon for a vulnerable female seen wearing slippers and a poncho.

Over Danson Park searching for a possible collapsed injured male from a nearby car accident.

Suspect search who decamped from a stolen car in West. Found hiding in a garden by I99 greeted by a ‘friendly’ police dog!

It’s not quite “Sherlock,” but it’s a window onto big-city policing — one with fewer shootings than in Washington.

“The idea was to keep the public informed of our activities, both to re-assure them, and to try and lessen their frustration at our sometimes disruptive presence,” Ricc Tartaglia, a member of the Air Support Unit, wrote in an e-mail.

According to Ricc, since the helicopter unit started tweeting in 2012, the number of citizen complaints has dropped. “If they know we are searching for a lost child, or hunting a burglar, they take more kindly to our presence and any disturbance that causes, particularly when we add that the person has been found safe, or the suspect arrested,” he wrote.

Ricc said they send tweets after one of the helicopters — code-named India 99, 98 and 97 — has been to a task. “There are certain roles and incidents that would not be made public, but generally we are quite open about our activities,” he wrote. They also tweet photos of London landmarks taken from the sky.

The District doesn’t tweet the locations of its two helicopters — for “operational reasons,” I was told. But could such a system work in the Washington area, with its welter of jurisdictions and obsession with security?

Seeing red

There’s a question that crops up occasionally on the written test for a learning permit: You’re stopped at a red light, and a police officer tells you to go against the signal. What do you do?

You drive through, duh. A living, breathing cop trumps an inanimate assemblage of metal, glass and wiring.

But what if that inanimate assemblage is a little more animate than most, possessing a fearsome intelligence and a faultless memory?

I’m talking about a red-light camera. One Saturday morning last month, I was headed south on North Capitol Street. I was about to drive through the intersection at Missouri Avenue when a D.C. motorcycle cop stopped traffic. It looked like a motorcade would be coming through.

In fact, it turned out to be a funeral procession. But none of us knew that yet. I watched as the motor cop, who had dismounted from his bike, made northbound traffic turn left onto Missouri. He was emptying the road in advance of the procession.

Meanwhile, the traffic signal kept cycling: green, yellow, red; green, yellow, red. . . . Vehicle after vehicle made the left against the light. The flash of the red-light enforcement camera kept going off like an overcaffeinated paparazzo.

And that got me thinking: Would those drivers — and there were dozens — end up automatically getting red-light tickets in the mail? Or would the system somehow know that they were just following orders?

Lt. Sean R. Conboy of the Metropolitan Police Department’s Office of Communications assured me that tickets would not be issued. The field of view in the photo that is snapped by a camera would include the officer in the street.

“Were this to happen, it would be caught in the review of the violation and the motorist would not be issued an infraction notice,” he wrote in an e-mail.

If your experience suggests otherwise, let me know.

Skin deep

Count Silver Spring’s Aleezah Rockler among those who think Washington’s NFL team should be renamed the “Deadskins.”

“We wouldn’t offend anyone,” she wrote. “Except for maybe dermatologists.”

That got me thinking. Rather than the Deadskins, how about the Washington Epidermis? Epidermis is basically the body’s dead skin, sloughed off and replaced every 48 days by new skin pushing up from underneath.

That pretty much describes how the Skins cycle through new coaches and quarterbacks.

Helping Hand

Our Helping Hand fundraising campaign continues. You can read about local charities Community of Hope, Sasha Bruce Youthwork and Homestretch at www.posthelpinghand.com. Each works to end homelessness in our area. In this season of giving, I hope you’ll consider making a donation to one, two or all three.

Twitter: @johnkelly

For previous columns, visit washingtonpost.com/johnkelly.