The police in Surrey have turned to the popular social media platform, Twitter, to make people more aware of crime involving vehicles. The incidents of car crime have been tweeted about this week, starting 11th July.
The Crime Vehicle Campaign as a whole has been in place for a number of weeks and is running for 12 weeks in total, from May to July. Surrey police held a tweet chat between 12.00 to 1.00pm on Monday, and messages sent were answered live. The remainder of the week, the tweets have been monitored but might not be answered immediately.
Duncan Greenhalgh, who is the superintendent, said that it takes only a few seconds to break into a vehicle, and that the police force hopes that this campaign will make people more aware of the situation regarding the amount car crime attacks on the general public’s vehicles. The police force has never used social media before in this way, but is confident the service will help with awareness.
The superintendent said that all the staff working on this campaign over the seven days have and will be tweeting all car crime events, and the aim was that letting the general public know about the events, and giving an easy method of contacting them with information may assist with catching the offenders and bringing them to justice.
He went on to say that the police have noticed just under a 6% decrease of car crime which is up to March this year. The police of Surrey are still working to keep these crimes a priority and are taking severe action against these crimes to try and reduce the levels in the area.