A TECH-SAVVY police officer has become the new commander for West Oxfordshire with a pledge to use the Internet to build closer ties to people.

Chief Inspector Colin Paine has promised to bring social media to his part of Thames Valley Police, and has started using social networking website Twitter.

The site allows users to write messages of up to 140 characters long from computers and mobile phones and Mr Paine said it offered an ideal opportunity to keep his “followers” informed.

And he hopes to get more officers using websites such as Twitter and Facebook.

He said: “I’m doing this so that we can communicate and so people can see some of the challenges of policing.

“I just plan on tweeting about what’s concerning me at the time.

“I hope to make it relatively personal and talk about things that are of interest to me.

“I hope to talk about what’s happening in the community as well and be specific about individual incidents and arrests that are happening around West Oxfordshire.”

He has already posted 12 tweets and has more than 100 followers, other Twitter users who select to be kept up to date with another user’s “tweets”.

He said: “There were a few raised eyebrows when I decided to do it. Social media has grown massively over the last five years and it would be wrong of us to ignore it.”

Messages so far have included an officer punched in the face and a car set alight in Chipping Norton.

He said: “I would love to get to the point where I had 500 followers. It would then provide the ability to communicate with a huge amount of the community very, very quickly.”

He said he hoped each neighbourhood police team would have a Twitter or Facebook account, which they would be able to send messages to while on the job.

But he said his force would continue to pursue a “traditional” approach.

He said: “It’s about adopting a really robust, traditional, no nonsense approach to dealing with offenders.

“It’s about police officers being part of the community – police are the public and the public are the police. We should be working hand in hand, talking to each other and acting on information the public give us.”

To follow Chief Insp Paine, visit twitter. com/Colin_ Paine