Just a quick blog in admiration of Greater Manchester Police’s PR coup yesterday. A bold and simple idea which made great use of Twitter and media relations to raise awareness of the day to day service our police forces provide.

I am biased by the way. My husband is a police officer and for the past 14 years I have become accustomed to the baffling variety of things he is asked to deal with, from closing the roads in snow and locating missing livestock, to attending post mortems and investigating serious crimes. It’s the sheer volume and variety of responsibilities that makes policing such a complicated and contentious issue. Where we will ever find enough resources to fund this inexhaustible supply of stuff to deal with? Human beings are endlessly creative when it comes to getting themselves in bother it seems to me.

Yesterday’s stream of tweets from GMP documented 24 hours in the life of one of the busiest forces in the country. Every single call received was logged and tweeted. Spoof Twitter accounts quickly sprung up and at times it was difficult to tell which were the genuine calls and which were the made up ones. A man reported dangling a baby off a bridge turned out to be carrying his nervous dog which suffers from vertigo; every few minutes a domestic incident; a woman who couldn’t find her phone; an intruder alert at a student house, each job requiring a series of decisions and judgement calls.

From a PR point of view I think this was a brilliant campaign that took advantage of the subversive and slightly voyeuristic nature of Twitter to show a glimpse of what we expect from the Police. The online activity gave the traditional media a great hook and allowed GMP’s Chief Constable a platform to talk about the challenge faced by his officers and civilian staff. He commented this morning (in 140 characters of course) :

RT @gmpolice: Chief Constable – currently policing only gets measured by the crimes recorded and detected and it doesn’t fully reflect what we do #gmp24

Hear hear!

Social media is often viewed as a threat by the police force and not without reason. All the more reason to praise GMP for engaging with the medium and tackling the inevitable criticism about wasting police resources.

Police blogs: The Orwell Prize winning blog Night Jack was taken down after the officer concerned was unmasked but allowed to keep his job but there are a number of official and off the record police blogs and websites. Take a look at Inspector Gadget for example.