Counties Manukau police tweeting towards a safer community

South Auckland police have taken to live tweeting call-outs in an innovative way to reach out to the public.

In 2011 Senior Sergeant Spencer Matthews became aware of just how powerful social media was in their field, and encouraged the station to get on board and embrace tools such as Twitter and Facebook.

“A couple of years ago I was at an incident in Mangere, while we were there (New Zealand musician) Che Fu tweeted that there was a shooting and a hostage drama around the corner,” Matthews said.

“That spread like wild fire on social media. It made us realise that the power of social media was something we had to be aware of and involved in.”

Che Fu corrected the wrongful tweet around five minutes later, but in that time it had already reached a significant audience.

Since then the Counties Manukau station has been using twitter to inform followers about a range of issues.

While the effectiveness in helping to solve serious crimes has been limited, the medium is proving useful in addressing traffic congestion problems.

This has been particularly beneficial at events such as Polyfest, the V8 Supercars and Super Rugby matches in the district.

“Certainly the live feeds of traffic congestion are good. We are able to tell people where the problems are.”

The issues addressed in the live call-out tweets range in seriousness from licence checks to suspected suicides, and offer a glimpse into the life of an officer in South Auckland.

“The main focus of the tweets I do is educating people about the kind of jobs police do. It’s not just running round having fun catching burglars, we deal with some very serious things,” Matthews said.

He said he tweeted a few messages about a man who had been found dead from an apparent suicide. “A couple of people felt that was inappropriate to say.

“But in that case the family all knew what had happened and I was very vague in regard to the location and description.”

Counties Manukau Police communications manager Ana-Mari Gates-Bowey has been measuring the success of the tweets, and believed it was helping to fulfill their overall goal of building trust.

“We do analyse our tweets, we have actually won a couple of awards for the most humorous tweet which has been great.

“For us the more people we can reach the better.”

Senior Sergeant Matthews, who has been in the police for 18 years, uses an iPad to tweet during call-outs.

He was encouraged by the fact that their Twitter followers had increased from under 200 to over 1300 in the last five months.