Market Sentinel has been helping The Greater Manchester Police Force understand conversations about them, across the internet, since November 2009. Once having understood the potential to engage key interest groups through social media, GMP launched their own profiles across key social media platforms including: YouTube and Flickr.

A recent effort to raise the awareness of their daily work has involved tweeting each reported incident through dedicated twitter accounts. Motivations behind the idea were to give the public an idea of the magnitude of their task. Not only this, but to involve local people with their police force, and allow them to gain an insight into what policing their area really involves. GMP felt that the public were not necessarily aware of a lot of the smaller issues that they successfully resolve every day. These different ventures into social media are important for GMP’s visibility, and to contribute to public awareness.

With financial cuts throughout most sectors of government, there has been a call for greater transparency in public spending. As far as the police force is concerned, this largely means justifying their use of time. Fiona McEvoy, of the Taxpayers’ Alliance, has criticized the initiative:

“The police should be catching criminals, not wasting time on social websites”

This opinion seems to show a lack of understanding about the initiative or its’ objectives. To be fair to GMP, the communications team has been managing the Twitter account, so it’s not as if officers are taking time off the beat to struggle with particular tweets.

More transparency like this will not only involve the public in policing their own communities, but also enable people to see how the police are really spending public money, and indeed, whether there is room to redistribute their resources.

Brief analysis of the tweets, using tools from Market Sentinel Labs, show us that rape incidents were the most frequently mentioned within our sampled data, whilst RSS analysis, of the GMP Twitter feed, indicates that the majority of the reported incidents occurred in Bolton and Rochdale:

Deeper analysis and key trends from this research are soon to follow.