In an extraordinary attempt at transparency, the Greater Manchester Police has been tweeting every single call, minuscule or serious, on Twitter. So many tweets have been coming in that the UK based police department had to create three separate accounts to get around TwitJail. Chief Constable Peter Fahy discussed the point of this Twitter overload: 

"It is a serious message about transparency and how we get that out to the public." 

"As well as serious crimes, we deal with many social issues and other incidents that the public are quite surprised about.

"Through this experience we get a better picture that crime is connected to our social issues such as drug use and relationship breakdowns.

"Many of the things we deal with are about the same people: missing people who have been missing 60 or 70 times before or repeat offenders putting demands on public services."

Since they started tweeting, the GMP Twitter page has skyrocketed from 3,000 followers to over 14,000. Tweets consist of calls to 999 (the British version of 911), such as: "Man refuses to leave the gym", "Woman being followed by suspicious vehicle", "Woman asking for advice about ex partner putting abusive messages on Facebook ", "Man calls police to say he is going away over Christmas, is worried he is going to be burgled". 

The amount of updates shed light on the overwhelming amount of emergency calls made to the GMP in just 24hrs. Have a look at what's going on outside of America at their three Twitter pages:

• http://twitter.com/gmp24_1
• http://twitter.com/gmp24_2
• http://twitter.com/gmp24_3

Definitely an interesting use of social media for public service!