The force posted brief details of all 3,205 incidents its officers had to deal with up until 5am today.
They were published through the website Twitter, which allows messages of up to 240 characters in each 'tweet'.
GMP 24: Data analysis of police tweets
Some 17,000 internet users were 'following' GMP on the internet during a day which saw officers arrest 341 suspects as they dealt with a huge variety of calls.
Among the incidents were two allegations of rape while, among the less serious jobs, officers also had to deal with a runaway horse and reports of teenagers throwing a huge snake over a fence.
Mr Fahy, who wanted to demonstrate how his officers deal with more 'social work' than crime, hailed the experiment after it came to a close.
He told the M.E.N: “It's been amazing because of the level of public and press interest. It's hard to think of any story we have had in recent years which has generated so much interest.
“Twitter has enabled us to get information out so quickly to the public.
This has really shown us that this is the future. It's been successful in showing the huge variety of police work we carry out.”
Asked if he would do it again, he said: “Yes. I thought this would be a complete one-off but there might be other days in the year we want to use it. We could particularly use it as a means of doing public appeals for information on crimes. This might be a much better way of finding witnesses.”
Many Twitter followers praised the experiment.
One said: “What comes across from these tweets is how much the police are involved in the community and how much they are relied upon.”
Another wrote: “I applaud the decision to open up your world to us. It was fascinating and they did more in the last five minutes than I thought they would in a whole day.”
Click on the grey box below to follow what happened throughout the 24 hours.
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Comments
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Interesting to see the amount of morons that report nonesense.
Its hard to understand if they are simply time wasters of just genuinely stupid.
341 arrests and no doubt over 300 of them will have been released this morning without charge....no point arresting people if either the police don't press charges or when it gets to court the courts don't serve up any justice. The police do NOT need to change their methods the justice system just needs bringing up-to-date with modern offences and start nailing these people for the crimes they commit. I have family in Canada and their justice system takes the best of America and the best of the Uk and combines them to create a system that really works. Crime in Canada is low and they do not have the issue America have of the public bearing arms.
I just wish that this country would sort out the justice system and then the countries other problems would soon fall into place. We need to bring back respect to our streets and one another otherwise this country will end up in civil war in the near future there is no other option right now.
More like 50 wasted man hours at least, based on an average of 1 min per tweet. How is that any sort of success? Complete waste of time,resource and tax payers money.
Getting more and more like George Orwells "Animal Farm" before long we will be twittering to the authorities, adding to our surveilance society.
Averaged around 133 incidents per hour? Even if you cut out false calls and turned this to 100 real incidents per hour, that's an incredible amount of work to respond to. And the government is talking cutbacks! Above everything, law and order must prevail and upheld, so give GMP the resources it needs. I wouldn't mind paying extra on top of the council tax to fund this.
"341 arrests and no doubt over 300 of them will have been released this morning without charge"
Evidence of that, Mr Jones? Sources? This is the kind of sweeping, outlandish and negative statement that infests these comment columns. I bet not many people would have guessed before this initiative that that number of arrests would be made in this period, but of course it's easier to snipe and criticise than actually make constructive comments, isn't it?
A complete waste of time and money. Just break it down a little Total calls 3205 which equates to 133 per hour. As a mean average that would be 12.1 calls per Division of the GMP. Let us not forget that many of those calls were routine, i.e. "G CID night log" Routine report. Many other where advice was sought, nothing more. Many calls would never have been made, had there been an officer on the street to witness the incident and deal with it.
This may sound like bitter sour grapes from me but it is not. I was a serving officer for over 30 years holding a Senior Rank. Police performance in the present day appals me, but, I must say mainly from the Command structure. Officers today do not know how to interact with the public, they are unkempt and scruffy in their appearance. We have seen pictures of officers with hands in pockets, no hats, untidy hair, and many with an attitude problem.
What confidence does it give when someone responds to a call looking as if they have just got out of bed and been dragged through a hedge backwards.
I was proud to have served but now I hear of nothing but critiscism from retired officers and the public alike.
As for waste Mr Fahey could save millions by trimming the grossly over staffed Civilian middle management, would produce and achieve nothing. He could also save huge amounts on the costs of his management structure. High ranking officers do not need private cost free cars providing to get to work. In my 30 years I provided and paid for my own transport.
There is so much waste, within the GMP, that I could go on for hours.
This was better than listening the the police on VHF radio when growing up. Hope it becomes a regular thing.
Mark,Radcliffe.... What has he to offer?
I don't think this initiative can be repeated, really, simply because the cat is out of the bag now. If they do it again, you can bet that idiots out there will be running competitions to see who can log the stupidest call etc etc, knowing that each one will appear on Twitter for all his mates to laugh at. Kinda like Big Brother - the first time, it was a bit of a social experiment and no-one knew what was going to happen, but since then it's just a collection of attention-seeking morons.
That said, the funniest was call 384: "report of man holding baby over bridge - police immediately attended and it was man carrying dog that doesn't like bridges"
The amount of coverage and debate this has generated in highlighting what the Greater Manchester Police actually deal with every day - which was the whole point - means this was an absolute success.
How typical that we get the usual ridiculous "blah blah wasted man hours" "blah blah go and arrest some real criminals" comments from armchair opinion givers who take the easy option of criticising everyone around them but probably give absolutely nothing to society themselves.
Both GMP and the individual came up with this should be commended for taking a forward thinking approach to engaging with the public, as well as creating a greater awareness of the inherant problems that come with dealing with idiots when they should be arresting "real criminals".
To John Gidmans curly perm.
It would appear that you are out of touch with what the public expects of its officer's and perhaps your reply highlights the ills of the present officers who do not know how to interact with the public. You must never forget that you are there to serve the public, and not the other way round.
You may regard that I am out of touch, but, I am not. I am still in touch with many officers, of all ranks. Why do so many say that "They cannot wait for retirement, it cannot come soon enough"
I was wrong on one point with my figures. The number of calls actually equates to 10.2 calls per hour, per division.
According to the report in the M.E.N. there are 5 shifts with 1400 response officers per shift. I have no idea who produced or supplied those figures as they are, either a complete mistake or a complete misinformation.
A shift is lucky to have 18 officers and at least one third of those are absent through, sickness, leave, or courses, leaving a maximum of 12 officers. My last posting had 5 towns to provide cover from those 12 officers.
The police do need a 'Live' public update system twitter or their own website so the public can help with ID and sightings, not good releasing video months after it happened. Ok this experiment has made the police very transparent for 24 hours which is great, but all it shows is the police waste 2/3 of their time on idiots. Social work should be done by social workers (lazy sods). Please read "Teenage car crash tragedy ‘was most distressing case in my career says expert" south Manchester addition. Just below the search bar top right of the main MEN page and choose south Manchester. This is a very sad story of a child in care 'or in this case not' as the person suppose to look after the kids at the home had no power to stop them if they decide to run off. Big chunk of police work searching for these missing kids and dealing with the aftermath of this sad story. Its the other agencies that are an unnecessary burden on police time and the drunk / druggies and psychiatric people living in the community with little or no supervision.
Some people commenting on here think 133 incidents an hour isn't much, well maybe not but considering that this experiment was done on a Thursday, I would like to know the difference on a Friday or Saturday.
i think this was an outstanding initiative.
People moaning wasted man hours etc... Moaning doesnt get you anywhere, but everyones allowed an opinion.
I hope to see this done again soon. I think it was a great way to highlight to the public the amount of serious crimes it has to deal with, and more worrying the amount of mickey mouse idiotic phone calls they have to deal with.
I think that, although the bobbies out there do an outstanding thankless job getting abused by people who think they know how to do the job better but can't be bothered getting out of their armchair, the real success has been in pointing out the workload of the control room staff and the buckets of patience they need to be able to deal with such inane and annoying calls.
The amount of abuse these people must take from the public for simply doing their job and trying to help and they are still courteous, polite and professional.
I applied for a job in the control a while back and I am really glad now I didn't get it.
Thank you for giving me a chance to see what you have to put up with.
GMP has around 8000 officers plus another 1000 specials and goodness knows how many PCSOs as well. As Fahy has said most of the calls are trivial and can be dealt with quickly and easily, however despite all the hyperbole and discounting the other supporting officers these figures represent alomst one incident for every three Police Officers. I wonder how many readers would think it acceptable if an NHS nurse only treated a patient once every three days?
Statistically the figures still stand, if you remove the trivial & nuisance calls and add back in the PCSO contribution, then the figures would be even worse. I did not take these into account, and as a result I think the figure is a fair representation.
Yes there are rest days, and there are holidays, and sick days, and training days, and team building days, the list goes on & on, but the Police service is so badly & ineffeciently managed that it is estimated that only 1 officer in 10 is on duty at any time, even that gives a figure of 2400 (three shift system) which still only amounts to roughly one incident per officer and again that is not taking the trivial & nuisance calls into account, not taking the PCSO's contribution either.
It's simply not good enough! What has been proved is that GMP are hugely under worked and inefficient on a scale which would not be tolerated in any other public 'service'.
The argument between current and ex police officers could go on forever. The truth is that times change. You won't find a detective in the pub now, you won't find detectives getting convicted criminals to admit hundreds of burglaries to get the figures up, criminals don't get good hidings and left on Winter Hill, money doesn't go missing, there's no racist jokes, your complaint won't be swept under the carpet... of course there are bad apples who let them down, but these are few and far between, although they rightly get a lot of press when they come to light.
On the down side, the mobile phone has multiplied the number of reports, it takes forever to deal with a minor incident, police officers are now social workers, security guards for paramedics, doormen, teachers, marriage counsellors, family advisors, parents, riot controllers... and not to forget, they are the first response to some of the most harrowing and horrendous incidents that the sight of would put the rest of us into therapy for years.
Type your comment here..Very interesting to learn about the a day in the life of Greater Manchester Police. Well done GMP. Given the nature of some of the incident, which I would define as non urgent, why do fully trained officers respond to this time of work, could it not be possible for civilian staff to deal with these and save police officer time for more important crime investigation. In light of budget cuts GMP could surely save money if civilian officers dealt with the routine non urgent incidents...