Current thinking and comment

By Kate Pickering

Last week saw the tweet all 999 switchboard calls throughout a 24 hour period. They are the UK’s first police force to publish a Twitter summary of every incident it is called to deal with.

Chief Constable Peter Fahy cited the decline of local press as a reason behind the exercise. He explained only a third of the incidents reported are genuine crimes with two thirds being ‘social work’ concerning alcohol-related disturbances, relationship disputes and mental health issues. So he was turning to Twitter to publicise the reality of police work, to show that British Bobbies are not just truncheon wielding they are caring and sharing too.

The timing for GMP’s transparency is interesting. Public services are on tenterhooks in anticipation of tomorrow’s government spending review. The Home Office, with responsibilities including policing, anti-terror operations and crime prevention, has been told to make £367m in cuts. Of this £135m is to come from police efficiency savings and £82m from ‘arm’s-length’ bodies such as National Policing Improvement Agency and the Serious Organised Crime Agency.

Home Secretary, Theresa May has said nothing will be off limits in a review of police pay and conditions. The Police Federation, which represents rank and file officers, predicts as many as 40,000 front-line posts could go in England and Wales over four years. The Scottish Police Federation predicts 2,800 posts could go in Scotland.

PR stunt or political plea the experiment gave a unique insight into the nature of the calls that flood into GMP. There was early skepticism from some Mancunians worried that the tweets would paint a dark picture of the region. It was not long before concern turned to embarrassment as the true diversity of incidents hit with numerous hoax calls and some just plain bizarre, of men holding snakes or wearing capes or carrying frightened dogs across bridges – and not threatening to drop a baby as reported. Of course there were serious cases. After 24 hours at 5am on 15th October and 3205 tweets later, GMP had made 341 arrests with 126 people still in custody.

As Britain’s second largest police force the exercise was no mean feat, not least because GMP’s 1400 response officers deal with up to 120 incidents an hour and Twitter limits its users to 100 tweets per hour or 1000 per day. If a user exceeds this limit they can not post publicly for period of time. To avoid ‘Twit Jail’, as GMP termed it, the force established early that they would be tweeting the incidents from four separate accounts: , , , .

In our resource poor climate there were inevitable claims that the exercise was a waste of time and money but the law on this was laid down early, and on a regular basis. Tweets were written by two dedicated PR officers, not frontline officers, and were not automated to ensure data protection. This was no toe dip to see what would happen; this ‘experiment’ oozed excellent organisation, platform awareness and ambition to use twitter to its maximum potential.

Recognition and thanks came from as far a field as Sydney, Australia and by 9am, after only four hours, Greater Manchester Police were nominated for a Golden Twit. I for one will be voting for them and not simply because the tweetathon was eye-opening and entertaining. Chief Constable Fahy is no stranger to the power of real-time, since the announcement of funding cuts he has hosted live-chats with the public he serves. Fahy has already suggested twitter will be called on again, maybe even to aid community policing, to identify and apprehend criminals. On the eve of his budget being slashed it seems the Chief Constable is living by the adage ‘never let a good crisis go to waste’. If the insights gained go towards affecting real change in public service delivery the Golden Twit will only be the first of many accolades.

In the meantime let’s just hope things don’t get quite as bad as spoof account suggests:

For images of the day check out Greater Manchester Police’s photostream on .

Vote for Greater Manchester Police in the Golden Twits.