For 24 hours from 5am yesterday Greater Manchester Police tweeted details of every call it received from the public. From the moment I heard about it on - on Radio 4's Today programme, actually - I thought it was brilliant initiative but inevitably it has attracted criticism as well as praise.
According to the Greater Manchester Police homepage (accessed 14.52 today), "The police were made aware of 3205 incidents and posted details of every single one on Twitter.
"The demonstration has seen Greater Manchester Police's Twitter profile go from having 3,000 followers in the two years since it was set up to more than 19,000 today."
The details are here.
Did it work? Clearly it raised the profile of GMP, and highlighted the range and breadth of police activity, at an interesting time, just days before the Government seems set to announce drastic cuts in funding that reduce the number of bobbies on the beat.
But the initiative was wide open to two obvious lines of attack. Firstly, it cost money, so would be criticised as wasteful of precious resources, and secondly, that it would be lampooned, spoofed and repurposed.
Both duly emerged and were, equally predictably, used as hooks for a Daily Mail analysis, which included the observation that "the public were left wondering how, if officers were so overburdened, time could be found to post over 1,000 incidents online."
"To make matters worse the stunt, by Greater Manchester Police, the country’s third largest force, was exploited by pranksters posting spoof incidents."
In my view, neither criticism amounts to much. It can't have cost that much money, can it? And, what exactly is the damage to the Force in some witty, and not so witty, spoofs. People make jokes about Plod - hardly a surprise. And easily outweighed y the many supoportive messages which are heard rather less often.
So did it engender goodwill and understanding, which is a reasonable aim for any PR initiative? Broadly, the answer has to be yes.
Chief Constable Peter Fahy said: "The reaction we have received proves that the public perception of modern day policing was removed from the reality that my officers face.
"We have tried to give a serious message about transparency and how we get that out to the public.
"As well as serious crimes, we deal with many social issues and other incidents that the public are quite surprised about.
"Through this experience we get a better picture that crime is connected to our social issues such as drug use and relationship breakdowns.
"Many of the things we deal with are about the same people: missing people who have been missing 60 or 70 times before or repeat offenders putting demands on public services."
So did it meet the objectives set by the Chief Constable? This is trickier. It may have made the breadth - and frustrations - of police work more visible, but that is not the same thing as transparency. Transparency is about allowing access to the decison-making process, and this most certainly doesn't come from a 142 character tweet about attending an incident.
More interestingly, the Twitter experiment serves to open up a debate about police work itself. There have been many comments about the 'social work' dimension of yesterday's activities, and it may well be that some who have followed the debate are beginning to ask whether police officers really are the people best suited to dealing with such incidents.
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