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'Ello, 'ello, 'ello. What’s all this 'ere, then? #CuriousCop

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Happy new year to all you Creativepoolers. Hope you had a blast – and not necessarily of reality. Lord knows we have enough of that for the rest of the year, so I hope you had a day off from the doom. I wonder how many of you went down to the Thames to watch the fireworks? Were you among those crazy die-hard fans of the banana and strawberry-flavoured extravaganza who queued since 3pm to get the best standing seats in [out of] the house?

But even if you were, and however long you were queuing, you possibly wouldn’t have got as good shots of the display as the Metropolitan Police flying around the area in their helicopter. They tweeted their pics of the momentous event – see below. Spectacular, eh?

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But should the police be tweeting at all? Especially when they’re ‘on the job’? Granted, it’s a nice photo – and looking at their Twitter feed, @MPSinthesky, they’re not bad amateur photographers, with their sunrises and sunsets and aerial views of the Houses of Parliament and the odd football stadium. But…so what?

Leaving aside that you can find similar photos with a click of your mouse just by searching Google Images, I don’t really get what the point is. According to various views I’ve read and heard on phone-ins, it’s because the police want to ‘connect more with the public’.

Is that important? Well, of course it is, on one level. But really, what does tweeting a picture of a sunrise actually do in terms of engagement? The short answer is not a lot. So why bother?

I understand that @Solihullpolice is reputed to deliver some of the most humorous tweets – again, for engagement purposes. They want the public to see their human side, they say. And granted, I did chuckle at this one:

‘48 cans of Red Bull stolen from the BP garage, Chester Rd – how do these people sleep at night…’

But without wanting to go all PC on you (ha! See what I did there? I should get a stand-up slot, I should), how ‘appropriate’ is it to be posting funny tweets about what is, after all, a crime? What’s next – suggesting that they trace someone who’s stolen a crate of beans via their farts?

I’m not sure what sort of people follow the police on Twitter, but a quick straw poll of my friends indicated that nobody did. And yet some regional police services are tweeting upwards of ten times a day. As I say, a lot of people apparently like this from an engagement point of view. But what if one widened the circle to other areas of employment? I can hardly see surgeons tweeting from the theatre (#heartraterising), nor teachers from the classroom (#thatkidissogettingdetention). As for me, when I’m writing TV subtitles for the likes of Corrie and (coincidentally) Cops On Camera, I am not allowed to have any of my social media sites open on my computer. Why? Because it’s distracting and it’s time out of my day when I should be working. And let’s face it, my job isn’t quite as important as that of the police.

Listen, I’m not a misery guts – there’s really nothing wrong with the tweeting of the fireworks on new year’s eve. But to use Twitter as a sort of stage to see who can be the wittiest cop doesn’t seem very ‘on brand’, so to speak. I suspect more people rolled their eyes than laughed when Surrey Police issued weather warnings with the Vanilla Ice-inspired hashtag #IceIceSurrey.

And to tweet a picture of some cupcakes with the line ‘Baking bosses = good! @SolPolCommander: look what I’ve got for you because you’re worth it #leadershipthroughcake’ seems a bit…

Well, you tell me. What do you think?

by Ashley Morrison

Ashley is a copywriter, editor and blogger

Follow him on Twitter

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