‘Allo ,’allo, ‘allo, what’s all this then?
For the past 24 hours Greater Manchester Police have been tweeting a (very) brief summary of every incident that they deal with. Using several Twitter accounts (@GMP24_1, @GMP24_2, @GMP24_3 and @GMP24_4), to avoid getting twitjalied due to the number and frequency of their tweets, 2 members of the PR team did more to highlight what a metropolitan police service does than a whole squad room full of chief constables could manage.
We saw over 3000 incidents in the 24 hour period, numerous abusive 999 calls (including one from a man who was having a problem with a cash machine), plenty of car theft and person theft crimes, a lot of missing children found and returned home and some very serious crime, including one rape, responded to. This inspired exercise in PR through transparency did exactly what the GMP intended it to, it showed that much of what we ask our police forces to do is not police work as we would expect it but the trivial problem solving that causes most of the people involved to start shouting ‘why don’t you go and catch some criminals instead’.
They end up doing it because no-one else will. Parents won’t go and find their own missing children even though they are in the same place that they were the previous 60 times they went ‘missing’. Pub landlords won’t eject drunks for fear of litigation or worse. Residents won’t ask noisy kids to keep the noise down because it doesn’t do any good. Then there are the time wasters. The man who called the police because he woke up confused after a night out drinking, the huge number of abandoned 999 calls that turned out to be a mobile phone in someone’s pocket. This experiment in making all of this trivia visible gives us a far better picture of what our police do everyday than those fly-on-the-wall TV documentaries that single out the exciting and entertaining incidents just to keep us watching.
GMP’s own summary of the 24 hour tweet has been published already. I watch with interest what the hacker community will do with all of this data over the next few days and weeks. I fully expect to get even more insight and understanding of 24 hours of metropolitan policing when the information has been analyzed and visualized. Move along now, there’s nothing to see here.
