Police tweetathon show pressure put on Suffolk’s officers

The event ran for 24 hours from 7am yesterday, Thursday 17th December, and saw volunteer police officers and staff working from the control room and tweeting details of calls as they came into the organisation.

In the 24 hours during which the event took place, 548 ‘CADs’ or police incidents were created, with 245 999 calls received and 502 other enquiries dealt with.

These include calls to the non-emergency 101 number. 532 tweets were issued by @suffolkpolice, giving details of the large majority of calls that came into the organisation. These received over 1000 re-tweets and more than 1600 ‘likes’.

The total ‘impressions’ over the event reached a million, showing the huge number of people who were able to learn about a typical day for Suffolk Police.

Superintendent Louisa Pepper, lead for the Contact and Control Room said: “I’m really pleased to say that yesterday’s event was a huge success. It was a big risk for us to take, as we have never before given the public such ready access to the information we receive.

“I am very glad we took the risk however, as we achieved our aim of showing people just a small part of what policing today involves. The majority of our communities think our work is purely about traditional policing, and responding to reports of crime, but the demand we face is far wider than this, covering all areas of community safety, vulnerability and safeguarding.

“This was a great chance for us to demonstrate this, whilst providing advice and information and highlighting how police telephone numbers should be used.

“The response to the event was overwhelmingly positive, showing us that people really are interested in what their police service does and are very keen to understand how our work has changed.”

Police and Crime Commissioner Tim Passmore said: “I am so pleased that the Tweetathon has been such a success. It was a really good opportunity for everyone to see exactly what our police officers deal with on a day to day basis, and doing this in real-time made this a particularly authentic exercise.

“It is a vivid illustration of the volume of work that the Constabulary undertakes during a normal working day and from the feedback it is clear that it was very well received by the public.

I’d like to thank everyone involved, especially the volunteers who gave their time to this innovative social media project.”