West Midlands police have been experimenting with Tweeting about court cases at Birmingham Magistrates Court. Should this sort of thing be a priority?
Have you ever wondered what happens inside Birmingham magistrates court? Well, speculate no more. This week, West Midlands police took to Twitter like … well, like underemployed pen-pushers who could be working on increasing the rape conviction, but are Tweeting instead.
I'd imagined that the combination of local court plus Twitter would be a marriage of inanity. I was wrong. It turned out that the 24-hour "tweet-a-thon" was both funny and sad. The life it showed is not a rich tapestry, but the repetitive bottom two inches of a threadbare rug: the thieves, the liars, the chancers, the sad, the desperate. There's the woman who stole cucumbers and flour from a shop (cucumber fritters?), the guy who stole electric fans, and the woman who stole mascara and hid it in her bra.
The West Midlands "tweet-a-thon" is a creative reaction to the decline in newspaper reporting of court proceedings, but I don't think it should be a police priority. There are surely other areas they should be focusing on. My last two encounters with the police went like this: a knock at the door late in the evening. A nice officer: "Hello, nothing to worry about. We've had a call from a woman in distress from around this area and all we know is that it's a dark-coloured front door." Another knock months later. A brusque officer to my mother: "We've had a call from a woman in distress with an Asian name. Who else lives here? Do you have a daughter? Does she know how to speak English?"
Guess what, I do! And whoever this woman in distress is, cops, you'd better get the hell off Twitter and find her.