Greater Manchester Police end 24 hour Twitter experiment to raise awareness
Police in Greater Manchester took to micro-blogging site Twitter to record every incident its force deals with in a 24 hour period. The experiment began at 5am Thursday 14 October 2010 and ended today at 5am.
The move from one of the only police forces in the country embracing Twitter was in effort to raise awareness of the wide range of incidents that police officers have to deal with every day.
The majority of calls placed were for what the GMP is referring to as social issues, such as:
- Call 295 Drunken man refuses to leave takeaway in Rusholme #gmp24
- Call 291 Tv and speakers found in Clayton at the side of the road #gmp24
- Call 384 report of man holding baby over bridge - police immediately attended and it was man carrying dog that doesn't like bridges
Greater Manchester Police reported each of the 3205 incidents during the period, which resulted in 341 arrests. 126 of those arrests remain in custody. Some of the more serious incidents tweeted include:
- ?Call 531 report of a man following school pupils #gmp24?
- ?Call 288 report of rape #gmp24?
- ?Call 253 Burglary discovered as homeowner woke up this morning in Salford #gmp24?
Chief Constable Peter Fahy comments, ?The reaction we have received proves that the public perception of modern day policing was removed from the reality that my officers face. We have tried to give a serious message about transparency and how we get that out to the public. As well as serious crimes, we deal with many social issues and other incidents that the public are quite surprised about.?
Support for GMP?s efforts flooded Twitter, with the #GMP24 trending worldwide. Tweets of support include:
- ?massively addictive, ground breaking work, good effort to all those involved?
- ?I've been following your updates all night. So fascinating. Keep up the good work?
- ?whole new appreciation for the police. fabulous idea and almost as entertaining as Stephen Fry?
Since it set up its corporate account @gmpolice in 2008 it managed to attract 3,000 followers; growing to more than 15,000 since the experiment began.
Tight anti-spamming restrictions in place by Twitter about the number of ?tweets? one profile can send during any given day meant GMP had to set up additional four Twitter profiles (@gmp24_1 @gmp24_2 @gmp24_3 @gmp24_4).
Two accounts were suspended for spamming, with GMP jokingly tweeting, ?Due to the amount of tweets we have been jailed on our second account and you can now follow on #gmp24 @gmp24_3.? A number of imposter GMP24 accounts were also set up, tweeting fake incidents.
The total number of Twitter followers across all the GMP profiles is almost 62,000.