North West Air Support group prepares for the impending NPAS National Police Air Service with a new Twitter account @NWCopter – complete with photo of Greater Manchester Police’s MD902, 159 followers, but no tweets yet.  We also notice similarly named accounts

• @GMCopter for the Greater Manchester Police- one test tweet 29th July 2011
• @LancsCopter for the Lancashire Police – one test tweet 29th July 2011
• @MerseyCopter for the Merseyside Police- one test tweet 29th July 2011 – but this unit closed in July 2011???
• @CheshireCopter for the Cheshire Police – but no tweets since 28th July 2011 when they said “we’re now part of a regional collab with other NW police forces, we’re ironing a few issues and will be tweeting again soon”

All in all, this seems to be a confused state of affairs.  Twitter is an ideal and simple way for a police air support unit to work with the community by assuring them what their tasks were, particularly to minimise complaints when a law enforcement helicopter needs to hover over a particular area for, say, 30 minutes.

Jeremy Parkin – HeliHub.com