The Galleon - Portsmouth's Official Student Newspaper

When I met Sergeant Rob ‘SARGE’ Sutton, he was busy typing on his phone.

But the leader of Portsmouth’s city centre police unit wasn’t being rude, he was just telling his followers that he had arrived at the Students’ Union for an interview.

The City Centre Unit (CCU), led by Sgt Sutton, tweet regularly about their day-to-day experiences policing Portsmouth’s shopping areas.

Many police forces have taken to Twitter in recent years, including the Greater Manchester force who tweeted every 999 call for a 24 hour period back in October 2010.

Yet the chief success of Portsmouth’s CCU police’s use of Twitter has been the shedding of the corporate image. The team of ten, including seven PCs and two PCSOs, is led by chief-tweeter SARGE.

The Twitter account, @pompeyccupolice, has attracted just under a thousand followers since January 2010, with their mission aim to “inform, educate and entertain.”

This wasn’t always the case, when the team first started tweeting they weren’t allowed to mention the cakes they had brought in for one of their member’s birthdays.

Sgt Sutton explained that the police need to communicate in new innovative ways: “We actually did it as another way of communicating to our neighbourhood, the community we look after.

“Quite often we do newsletters, which is the traditional way. But with a newsletter, as soon as that’s published it’s out of date, so we wanted to keep things more current and to explain to people not only what we do but the things that are happening where you live, where you shop, where you visit.

“We don’t want to paint a dark picture of crime but we put some interesting things on there.”

He added that: “We’re trying to break down the barriers a bit, we’re not hidden in vehicles or in buildings. My team are certainly out and about on foot because we look after the retail areas.

“Please do come up to us and ask us your questions, if we can engage with people on social media we’ll do it that way as well.”

The police are evidently searching for new methods of communicating with the public but interestingly this two-way communication has led to a few arrests: “We’ve had a couple of arrests because of information we’ve had that has come via Twitter, but we wouldn’t recommend that people do that because it’s in a public environment. They open themselves up to the possibility of exposing who they are.

“We’ve only got nearly 1,000 followers so compared to the 140,000 people in Portsmouth it’s a very small following, so the likelihood of that information getting out is very slim anyway but we recommend that if you want to report crime you phone up and do it through the normal channels.”

The remit of the CCU is only in the daytime in the city centre shopping areas but they regularly update their followers about other police units in the city.

Sgt Sutton said: “We had one where someone threw a bike on a railway line in Cosham, now that’s nothing to do with city centre but we put it on Twitter and our response units were driving towards it as well as a nearby firearms unit, then the train arrived and hit the bike.

“The Pompey News cut and pasted in the story the next day. That made us suddenly realise that we have to be very mindful of what we’re putting on Twitter.”

Even when back in the office the team tweet, updating their followers on events out in the city, so that they are able to “read a crime happening.” The team are careful about who they follow too, avoiding celebrities, with one exception: “We only follow about 20 [police forces], we can’t follow celebrities because that wouldn’t be appropriate for us as police.

“However, we do follow Jake Humphrey because I’m Formula One mad!”

With more and more police teams joining Twitter we could see a very new ‘ello ‘ello ‘ello.