Twitter Helps Reading Festival Crime Fall

6 September 2012, 06:00

Thames Valley Police say 139 crimes were reported during this year's Reading Festival - and Twitter's helped cut the crime rate.

Last year, 231 crimes were reported over the 3-days of the Reading Festival - and that was also down on the previous year - in 2010 when 445 crimes were report while it was 530 in 2009.

Speaking to Heart after the final figures were published, Chief Inspector Christian Blunt says social media played its part in the drop of nearly 40 per cent in the crime rate during the 2012 Reading Festival over the August bank holiday.

Chief Inspector Blunt said; "A 40 per cent reduction in crimes in a success story by any measure. Of course any crime is too much crime, but considering there were nearly 90,000 people on site, the crime figures are very low."

CI Blunt added: "If we do have any issues on site during the event, it means we can get messages out there very very quickly. We've seen it works very quickly especially with the issue of crime prevention. Using social media means we can also connect with the events own website and social media platforms to get messages to vast numbers of people very quickly."