Tweeting Jailbirds

Montgomery County DA Brett Ligon received some local press with his announcement that he will be Tweeting the names of those arrested for DWI this weekend. The reasoning, I assume, is that this may serve as some sort of deterrent. Those that may consider driving drunk, may think twice about it if they know their good name will be blasted all over the internet. Your mug is already guaranteed to appear in the newspaper later in the week, but this would be more instantaneous as BlackBerries and iPhones buzzed the hips of Tweeters all over Montgomery County upon your arrest.

It's uncertain how much of a deterrent this could serve to be, considering that the DA's office Twitter account currently only has 41 followers as of tonight (one is me). After some exposure on the Houston news, you'd expect them to receive a little more interest than that! At a minimum, I'd expect some people to  be a little curious about who's getting busted, especially when you have DWI-prone local elected officials like we do. Is it that people just don't care who is getting a DWI or is it the case that Twitter just isn't very widely used at this point? A cursory review of the follower list found a local lawyer and a bail bondsman. This service will make their life a little easier, I would guess.

So the jury is still out on this Twitter service by the DA's office. Although it's having a rough debut, I think it's worth a try. If you can save a life, give it a try.

MCDAO Twitter Account: @MontgomeryTXDAO

UPDATE: 12/20/09 - So on Saturday night I kept waiting, but no tweets. From what I understood, Ligon was going to tweet the names of those arrested, as they were arrested. All we got was a daily summary. Snooze. I guess this show-bird was chicken when it came to actually following through on what he told the entire Houston metropolitan area he was going to do. All squawk and no tweet?