Greater Manchester Police (GMP) are tweeting all incidents they deal with today. It’s an interesting communications experiment, but I’m not sure what value it brings to their residents.
The idea would appear to tick all the modern communications boxes: It’s immediate, the public can respond to and share information and the GMP can claim that they’re opening up their work to Manchester residents. All good things, but the tweets themselves tell a somewhat more prosaic story. (Actually, there’s a highly amusing poetry in these tweets, but that’s not the point).
- Call 440 damage to windows in Bury
- Call 435 suspicious male in Salford
Without any context or details (which windows? what does the Salford male look like? why is he suspicious? Is it Mark E Smith?) the messages serve little purpose. What is there to do with this information? Is there any point in sharing it, or replying to the GMP?
Chief constable Peter Fahy claims that it gives the public an idea of what sort of challenges the police face, especially those that are “not recognised in league tables and measurements”; the impact of mental health issues and drugs, for example. This sort of language will resonate with the Coalition, and the Comprehensive Spending Review is published next week. In short, the exercise could be seen as a pretty smart piece of PR (the GMP Twitter accounts quickly gathered thousands of followers and the chief constable was interviewed on The Today Programme).
GMP's Twitter feed
The experiment shows how the internet can be used to provide an immediate, ‘raw’ method of conveying a message that perhaps breaks down the public’s apparent mistrust of traditional communications channels, such as a press release or local news interview slot. But it’d be really interesting to see the police broadcast more obviously useful information, or use the internet as a means of gaining feedback.
Note: I originally posted this on my employer’s blog. I’m posting it here because it’s reasonably interesting and I liked the fact it’s short (under 300 words), dips into an issue and was written and published in response to a news story in about 20 minutes. I’ve made a couple of very minor amends.