#Free the Topsham 1 Twitter Campaign

A Twitter campaign has begun - with the tongue-in-cheek hashtag of #FreetheTopsham1 -  after the popular local PCSO Sarah Giles, who tweets as @TopshamPolice, was ordered to stop tweeting.

PCSO Giles, who has more than 1,000 followers, was told to close her account after her tweets about covering freshers weekend drew criticism from some quarters. Gareth Oughton, from the university’s Student Guild, said the police were contacted about “the reinforcement of negative stereotypes”.

Despite that belief, sparked by her fact-based comments on student mayhem and alcohol consumption, her tweets also offered plenty of good advice, such as “Spoke to several young ladies about walking home safely last night. Don't rely on your mobile phone for company  HYPERLINK "https://twitter.com/search/?q=%23exeterfreshers&src=hash" #exeterfreshers” and “two ears, one mouth, prioritise accordingly”.

But her tweets also hinted at what our local police have to face. Uncomfortably close to the brutal murder of two policewomen in Manchester, PCSO Giles remarked on one man who told her and her colleague: “You need a warrant to search me, bitches.”

Chris Boarland, assistant chief constable of Devon and Cornwall Police, told BBC Devon: “I think social media is a fantastic tool for communication and there shouldn’t be rigid control of it. I think Sarah’s done a fantastic job in her PCSO role on social media. No one is going to be banned from using social media but we have to have some guidance around it.”

One of the early adopters of social media in Exeter, PCSO Rich Shelton, said last year that he found Twitter was a great way of getting information out to people quickly and getting information back. “People may have misconceptions about something that has occurred in the area and we can sometimes put those right within minutes on Twitter before they escalate. It's all about engaging the hard to reach groups with social media as well,” he said. 

“I thought long and hard about what I should be tweeting. I didn't want to make it too boring - ‘I saw three people while on patrol today’ - but to keep it quite varied and informative and keep people's attention. I wanted to also show that yes, we are  PCSOs but we are also normal family people with our own social lives and what affects people in the community affects us too.”