POLICE officers should use social media to speak directly to the public.

In the five years since Kier Pritchard joined social media networking site Twitter, he has posted more than 4,500 times and amassed 5,300 followers.

“There’s something about being able to connect with everybody,” he said. “I use it to talk directly to my staff, but I think you can connect with people with whom you would never otherwise have a conversation, whether they are in our county or across the globe. I think it’s also a way of being able to humanise the incredible role our staff do and thank them, showing them there’s personality in policing.

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“For me, that’s showing I’m a family man. I love my community, I love my five children, my wife. I can show that I might be a chief constable, but I’m also going to be taking my middle lad to rugby on a Saturday afternoon.”

The majority of chief constables across the country now use Twitter to share police appeals and updates from their days.

And Mr Pritchard recommended his officers get on the social media bandwagon: “You’ve got to embrace the fact that our generation has grown up with social media.

“Through Instagram, Facebook and especially Twitter, we can have a really honest conversation. We need to make sure there’s a policy and it’s appropriate, but within the boundaries we should have a good, honest, robust conversation.”

Last year, a College of Policing-backed research project said forces struggled to understand social media. “If you can build trust, engagement and rapport with the public on social media, you will increase the amount of information that comes back to you, you will know about more crime and you’ll be able to solve more crime,” said researcher Prof Martin Innes of Cardiff University.