ON THE RECORD

ANOTHER TWITTER ACCOUNT COPS IT

01 August, 2011

Who says only India has Twitter twits? The Twitter account of Australia’s Victoria Police gave a blow-by-blow account of a football match between Scottish giants Celtic and Melbourne Victory. The winners: Victoria Police. The first tweet from @VictoriaPolice (which has 20,000 followers, both supporters and walloper-haters) said: “Game about to start with one person already evicted from ground. What a waste of ticket money!” The tweets kept up a tally of the score and the number of barrackers evicted. When the Celtics scored the only goal of the match, a tweet whooped: “Celtics one. Police five!!!!” The wrap-up was: “Game over. Celtics 1 - Police 14.” One follower laughingly commented: “Who let Chief Wiggum [from The Simpsons] on @victoriapolice twitter duty tonight. Who dunnit?” Others read blithe fascism into the tweets. A commenter charged the police with parading “its ambition to evict the maximum amount of people possible from a soccer match”. Another shot back: “So the Police are being policed by the Fun Police?” Victoria Police doused the scrimmage by apologising, unconvincingly.