Tweeting cops

The Greater Manchester Police Twitter feed reads a lot like a traditional police blotter.

"A man has been seriously injured following a collision in the airport tunnel this morning," read a tweet posted on Tuesday morning, followed by a link to the police department's own website, with more details. Individual districts also have their own Twitter accounts with updates ranging on crimes large and small.

Earlier in October, for example, the Tameside North Twitter account wrote: "Reports of fireworks being thrown, patrols to be stepped up to locate offenders," and then later: "Detained the males who are suspected of throwing fireworks, none found on them, given stern warning if continued."

The Greater Manchester Police has been one of the prominent examples of the adoption of social media amongst local law enforcement in Europe. In October 2010, the department famously tweeted all incidents that it had to respond to in a 24 hour period. Last week, the northern English force hosted a conference on the use of social media for European police departments.

Around the world, social media has reached incredible numbers - 200 million Twitter users, and over 800 million Facebook users - and not surprisingly law enforcement are following suit. In a September survey, the International Association of Chiefs of Police found that 88 percent of agencies they surveyed use social media. Of those that do use it, over 75 percent of respondents said their agencies use Facebook, while over 33 percent said they use Twitter.

Direct contact with the public

"We're tweeting because it's an excellent tool for us to be able to have contact directly with the public," said Kevin Hoy, Greater Manchester Police's web manager, in an interview with Deutsche Welle. "We can provide information for them about their local policing service, and we can also ask for information and intelligence about crimes that we are investigating ourselves."

While other police forces around Europe do use social media like Twitter, Facebook and Flickr, most simply push content to followers and allow for little or no interactivity between police officers and the public. However, Manchester's officers make a point to interact directly with their community and their beats - sharply different than most law enforcement social media strategies.

"If we're dealing with a job, we'll tweet about that job, we'll put pictures on about that job," said Jenny George, a tweeting officer who covers the Heywood area of Manchester. "And you'll watch them on their phones standing outside their houses watching you doing the job that you're tweeting about."

Each of Manchester's 59 police districts have two designated tweeting police officers like Constable George.

She argued that by keeping the tweets at a very local level allows the officers to sometimes establish a very personal relationship with their followers.

"We have particular groups of people who will tweet to say 'good morning, good afternoon, good evening,' and ask you how your day's been," she said. "People who were very anti-police before now come and sit down every three months when I put free tea and coffee on for them - and people will turn up and go 'You know what - I didn't understand anything before, now I do.' Satisfaction rates have gone from borderline bottom through the roof."

Followers on the rise

Last August, cities across England exploded in riots and looting, and Manchester was no exception. Some politicians called for social media sites to be shut down to prevent people from organising riots - but Manchester Police used the technology to its advantage.

"We've used Flickr in the aftermath of the riots here in Manchester," said Chris Alderman, head of visual media for the department. "We put on the CCTV stills and video footage from our unit who were doing the investigation. In the first four days we had something like a million hits on those images alone. And we were identifying people as a result from very early on in the process."

After the riots Greater Manchester Police' number of Twitter followers shot up from 17,000 to nearly 100,000. Police officials say It helped them catch and successfully prosecute hundreds of looters - but it was also in the wake of those riots that some critical voices began to emerge.

"It has the potential to ruin lives of people who have not actually committed a crime," said Sunny Hundal, a columnist at The Guardian newspaper and a civil liberties campaigner.

"Recently, the police in Manchester tweeted about a guy who was suspected of an arson attack on a shop during the riots. Someone finds out their details, and then someone firebombed his place as a retribution. He wasn't actually around during the protests, so the police got the wrong person."

However, Greater Manchester Police later said the fire was later confirmed as accidental and not arson.

Mistakes rare, police assert

With thousands of tweets going out each week, the police are bound to make a few mistakes, countered Kevin Hoy, the department's web manager.

"We're very careful and very clear about what we can and cannot tweet," he said, adding that such instances are very rare.

"And the information that we would release about people who've been charged or arrested is information that would be in the public domain anyway - it would be available in the local press. So we wouldn't release any details that weren't already out there."

Still, despite the promotion of social media, not everyone is convinced that this style of online policing will translate to other parts of Europe anytime soon.

After all, observed Sebastian Denef, one of the conference's organizers, it wasn't so long ago that there were secret police forces operating in many parts of Central and Eastern Europe.

"I don't think that this is like a role model that we should copy to all the other countries, because we have different cultures, different ways of interacting," added the researcher from the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology in Sankt-Augustin, just outside of Bonn, Germany.

Author: Lars Bevanger, Manchester / cjf
Editor: John Blau