Greater Manchester police force tweeting every incident over 24 hours

POLICE in greater Manchester are using Twitter today to tweet every incident they deal with today as a means to highlight the complexity of their work.

The move comes in the light of imminent government spending cuts, with the force intending to highlight the amount of work officers deal with.

The Greater Manchester Police (GMP) began tweeting at 5 a.m. today, recording incidents from alleged sexual assaults to cows on a road and a man asleep at a bus stop. One report involved a man holding a baby over a motorway bridge – though it turned out that the man was carrying a small dog that doesn’t like bridges. You couldn’t make it up!

GMP Chief Constable Peter Fahy said: "Policing is often seen in very simple terms, with cops chasing robbers and locking them up. However the reality is that this accounts for only part of the work they have to deal with. A lot of what we do is dealing with social problems such as missing children, people with mental health problems and domestic abuse. Often these incidents can be incredibly complex and need a lot of time, resource and expertise."

It’s an interesting experiment, but it has left GMP open to lampoonery. The official twitter accounts are at - @gmp_1 @gmp_2 and @gmp_3, whilst the spoof account is @gmp24_7.

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