A man who sent 600 racist, homophobic and antisemitic
tweets over the course of one weekend has been jailed.
David Bitton, 40, sent
hundreds of “horrific” messages to Greater Manchester Police (GMP)
“and many others” in May 2016, the force said.
Bitton, of Grosvenor
Road, Altrincham, also sent threats to GMP dog handlers.
He admitted 13 counts of
sending racist and threatening communication at Manchester’s Minshull Street
Crown Court and was sentenced to four years.
A GMP spokesman said
concerns were raised by the force’s corporate communications branch on 13 May
2016 after Bitton tweeted about 600 “highly abusive” updates on
Twitter.
He said after Bitton was
arrested, he told officers that he had only written the tweets in order to gain
followers and had deleted them soon after.
Det Con David Stevenson
said while Bitton had claimed he was “only craving attention and
followers”, what he wrote “was of such a horrific, threatening and
narrow-minded nature” that his sentence was “entirely
justified”.
“Bitton will spend the next four years thinking about his
actions and how they have affected the people they were aimed at.”
