A Day in the Life

One of my Twitter friends (she's an IRL friend as well) brought my attention to the fact that Greater Manchester Police are tweeting general information about every phone call they get for 24 hours from 05:00 today. They are highlighting the fact that they have to deal with a broad range of calls, most of which take up considerable time and energy but are not the kind of incidents included in crime statistics, so the work goes largely unnoticed by the public and, more importantly, the politicians.

I've been following them for an hour now and have seen about 150 calls logged, some serious ones like a 3-car accident in Wigan and various street robberies (mostly in Salford, where I used to live), some unexpected ones like 'calling to inform us that door-to-door sales will be taking place' (it looks like it's a requirement for the police to be informed if you're going to do this), and some bizarre ones like 'man shouts "you're gorgeous" to woman' and 'man locked out of house, wants police to break in for him'. Plus there have been 25 or so prank calls or silent calls - either children playing with the phone or people making inadvertent 'pocket calls' from their mobiles. And there were 39 arrests between 09:00 and 11:30.

It's only a quarter of the way through the day and it's had the desired effect on me - made me realise just how much the police gets involved in. And how little we give them credit for.