Twitter Everything?

The police department in Manchester, England is "tweeting" nearly every incident over the course of their days in an effort to shine a spotlight on the work that they are expected to do in the face of massive budget cuts:

• From stolen cars to suspicious smells, one of Britain's biggest police forces is tweeting every incident it deals with over a 24 hour-period to prove a point.

  The online Twitter campaign aims to show the pressures that police are under as British officials prepare for deep budget cuts.

• The project, which began at 5:00 a.m. Thursday, has already racked up more than 1,300 different incidents. Among the first tweets: An alert about a stolen vehicle thought to be headed for Manchester, the arrest of an aggressive shoplifter, and a report that "a man appears asleep at bus stop.''

• Many tweets covered domestic incidents, traffic accidents, stolen cars and missing people. There were calls about animals, complaints about a man urinating against a school wall, and a report of someone smoking on an incoming flight to Manchester Airport.

  There were also dozens of false alarms.

Someone from the 911 building can get specifics, but this 2007 article says Chicago handles something like 5.5 million calls a year. That averages to over 15,000 calls a day and we know the volume hasn't gone down. And in case anyone here needs reminding, the number of officers has gone down. Significantly. Especially on the streets and since we're the only major department in existence that still sends a car to 95% of the calls, guess what that means?

We aren't big fans about starting up a "twitter" unit - people would start calling them "twits" in short order - but maybe the Crystal Ball Unit could "twitter" in their spare time seeing as how they haven't predicted anything yet aside from two Bears victories. 5.5 million "tweets" are a lot of event numbers.