Greater Manchester Police Twitter

[AliceWorld]

Is this just me?

This BBC report is about GMP tweeting all the incidents they respond to in a day.

It gave me a start on the radio this am when they were talking about how they wanted to highlight that they dealt with social issues such as 'missing children, mental health and domestic abuse'. The link above replicates that phrasing.

Are they creating a distinction between 'real crime' and 'social issues? And then putting domestic abuse as a 'social issue' rather than a 'real crime'? Great to highlight prevalence of domestic abuse, but is framing it as a social issue heading down the road of it being what happens behind closed doors and questioning the role of the police? I appreciate they say it is still important, but if they create this binary, and then the government link to their discourse of cuts, is there room for the police to deal with 'social issues' rather than fighting 'real crime'?

Does anyone else get that from it?

I think they are just saying that there is a lot more to police work than chasing burglars carrying swag bags.

Yes, reading the piece you link to, I do get the same impression as you. Especially with the comment 'I'm not sayig we shouldn't deal with these kinds of incidents' -- which answers an implicit question 'Should the police be involved in domestic abuse'. That is a very retrograde question and one which the characterising of da as a 'social issue' invites.

think it was unfortunate phrasing. surely if the govt are going to look at this with a view to cuts, they are going to ask the question ' how have the officers got time to tweet?'

But otoh they want senior police officers to be flaming well elected, which means them spending a lot of their time on idiotic crowdpleasing communication.

Alice I agree with you. Putting domestic abuse under a "social issue" banner trivialises it.

Domestic abuse is very often (sadly ) - real crimes - eg violence/intimidation/harrassment/sexual abouse/rape.

I would never have used that phrase that the Chief Constable made.

The fact that he made it, to me, speaks volumes about his attitude.

No problem with the tweeting etc but big problem with this type of comment.

So I am going to register my displeasure here on their website feedback form.

This is just an example of waste by the police and it will surely be cut.
I agree that calling domestic abuse a social problem depends on the nature of the abuse. Physical abuse is obviously a violent act and so is very much a 'real crime' but I suspect the police will look at emotional/financial abuse as a social problem.

huddspur - a very low percentage of DV victims are actually seen by the police so I very much doubt that the police are using any of their time dealing with emotional/financial abuse!

Er hudd, you know it's only for today, right?

Thanks for confirming its not just me

Yes I can imagine when Jo Public or PC* Bloggs talk about domestic abuse they are not thinking of the nuance of emotional, psychological, financial abuse, but domestic violence.

(*writing this made me wonder whether they still use WPC for women? I hope not! Not unless they use MPC for the men. Mind you at least it isn't LPC for lady. Off to google...)

It's not actual police officers tweeting, it's PR people. They said that on Twitter quite early on today.

It was a police officer that made the statement. It wasn't made on twitter.

Chief Constable Peter Fahy

Mr Fahy said: "Policing is often seen in very simple terms, with cops chasing robbers and locking them up.

"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.

"Often these incidents can be incredibly complex and need a lot of time, resources and expertise.

"I am not saying that we shouldn't deal with these types of incidents, far from it. But what I am saying is that this work is not recognised in league tables and measurements, yet is a huge part of what we do."

Sorry, didn't mean the statement, I was referring to comments about police wasting their time on Twitter. My point is they're not, it's the PR people typing out the Twitter stream.

Bit late, but looking at some of the other tweets and blogs about this, I think there was a mistake in the terminology used.

They seem to have two terms (neither of which are domestic abuse.) Domestic violence, which is quite rightly categorised as a major crime and domestic dispute, which is what they're putting under 'social work'. I really don't believe they (officially) think that DV is not a real crime. How it works in RL, and with individual officers I don't know - I've heard too many tales of violence not being taken seriously, not to be a tad sceptical. For this exercise though, I think it was just an error in wording (maybe one they should correct!)

I get you ProfYaffle

Interesting Serenity. Do you have the links for any as I'd be interested to see what others are saying.

Not to hand, sorry - it's just been links posted with the #gmf24 hash tag and there's just so many tweets with that now! If I find them/more get linked I'll post

Oh this annoyed me so much on news 24 earlier. They seemed to be dismissing 'another domestic incident'.

I don't understand in what way "domestic abuse" is absent from the league tables? Don't they count assault, GBH, rape, harrassment etc any more then?

I've been thinkibng more about this, and I am actually angry now.

One occasion I called the police on my exH I was made to feel belittled, and even heard exH and the policeman laughing about me downstairs.

I had requested a female officer to be present but sadly she was as bad as the men were.