Justin Fenton's report this morning that police are investigating a series of rapes, many concentrated in East Baltimore and others near bus stops, has many in the city on edge, both because of the danger and because of questions about how quickly the department has been able to inform people about the risk. In the wake of the department's slow warning about a series of rapes in the Mount Vernon area a year ago, there was reason for concern. As Fenton pointed out, the department did not initially seek to spread the word through the media or through its Twitter and Facebook pages.

Department spokesman Anthony Guglielmi told me today that the department, as a rule, doesn't tweet rapes because of the sensitive nature of the crime. That's reasonable in the case of an individual rape, but maybe not once police start to think there's a pattern going on. Guglielmi said the department wanted first to disseminate information to community leaders and later did decide to send an alert through the media and its various means of electronic communication.

In the end, the department got to the right place, but it might want to be quicker to turn to social media in the future. Certainly the department should continue to work directly with community leaders, who often have close working relationships with the police and can help turn up leads in addition to spreading the word. But the police now have tools at their disposal to directly reach a group of people who connect to their community in a different way. In this kind of situation, it's crucial to get information out as widely as possible so that potential victims can take precautions. When it comes to deciding which medium to use to communicate that message, it shouldn't be either-or, or one then the other. It should be all of the above, right away.