The Greater Manchester Police in the UK is tweeting each incident it deals with over a 24 hour period.
The aim of the project is to give the public an idea of how much work the officers do, along with giving politicians an idea of what incidents they sift through that are “not recognised in league tables and measurements”.
The campaign is also to raise awareness before the police experience projected budget cuts in the UK government’s Spending Review on October 20.
Officers are posting updates on three feeds – @gmp24_1 and @gmp24_2 and @gmp24_3 – until 0500 GMT on Friday. They are also aggregated on their home page.
All feeds have well over 700 tweets in total, each tweet representing a call received by the police.
Some of the calls involved disruptive behavior, such as nuisance phone calls and reports of ‘suspicious’ individuals.
Some strange ones submitted included a confused man reporting that his TV is not working and a woman ringing about a car she abandoned at a petrol station after putting the wrong fuel in the tank.
Others were more serious, which included cases of theft, fraud and assault.
There were a few technological complaints, such as a woman reporting that a Youtube video of her was uploaded without permission and reports of computer hacking.
Many involved unintentional calls to the police, such as children playing with mobile phones and accidently dialing their number.
“Policing is often seen in very simple terms, with cops chasing robbers and locking them up,” said Chief Constable Peter Fahy.
“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,” said Fahy.
