Slashdot Mirror
UK Police Force Posts All Its Calls On Twitter
Stoobalou writes "One of the largest police forces in the UK is posting every incident reported to it today on Twitter. Greater Manchester Police began its 24-hour experiment this morning at 05:00 BST, tweeting all incident reports in the hope of highlighting the complexity of modern policing. 'Policing is often seen in very simple terms, with cops chasing robbers and locking them up,' Chief Constable Peter Fahy said in a statement. 'However the reality is that this accounts for only part of the work they have to deal with.'"
"Local authority's twitter account has been hacked"
# call 1068 bag stolen in street in Oldham #gmp24
# call 1069 bag of sand obstructing traffic in Oldham #gmp24
1) steal a bag of sand
2) obstruct traffic with said bag
3) ???
4) profit!
Take a look at the excellent parodies too.
To be fair, this is two staff from the PR department doing the tweeting, not front-line police officers. Given the publicity they've received in return for those two person-days of effort, it seems like pretty good value to me.
Because every single one of those 10,000 people is dedicated to answering the phone.
According to the paper you linked, they only have 7000 officers to cover 500 square miles. The entire point of this exercise is to highlight the sheer volume of work they have to deal with and how much of their time is wasted on bullshit calls.
Quite frankly I wish MORE police agencies would do similar. This should be public information to begin with, and it helps create awareness of what these people go through on a daily basis. The transparency is nice. It takes all of 20 seconds for the person taking the call to type it out.
=Smidge=
I would hope that they are.
The 999 system data would not be sufficiently anonymized and be too long for twitter's character limit. I would also prefer to know there's at least some separation between the E999 networks, and the general internet.
Rather than risking an automated filter, and since this is a single-day thing, it makes more sense to bruteforce it. If it was going to be a permanent fixture then I could see the value in going whole-hog and automating it.