The Fresno Police Department is at the forefront of a new social media technology that will assign threat levels to individuals using their posts on social media. The product known as “Beware” uses similar technology as credit checks and is supposed to determine how much danger the officers will be getting into when responding to 911 calls.

Fresno PD will be using the technology for 18 months free of charge, and will be a test market for the implementation of Beware software in larger cities.

Intrado the company behind “Beware” has purchased billions of pieces of  commercially available personal information. Using arrest records, as well as previous addresses and phone numbers, the software quickly produces a dossier on anyone who lives at a given address, as well as assigns them a threat level of “green”, “yellow” or “red”.

Using hashtags such as #ShootThePolice will raise your threat level, but so will playing games with words like “rage” in the title.

“It doesn’t make them a criminal necessarily, some of those comments, but it certainly gives the officer an awareness that this person may have an anti-police sentiment and be an increasing level of threat to them,” Fresno Police Chief Jerry Dyer told ABC 30.

Watch the ABC report here:
http://abc30.com/video/embed/?pid=525999