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Tuesday, May 17, 2016

State Police to use Private Social Network for Neighborhoods

The Delaware State Police is the first State Police agency in the country to utilize Nextdoor.com. Nextdoor.com is a private and secure social networking tool used to help foster neighbor-to-neighbor communications.

Selected Troops throughout the state are piloting the social media platform. Neighbors across the state will be able to work together to increase safety and strengthen virtual neighborhood watch programs with the support of the Delaware State Police and Nextdoor.

The Delaware State Police announces this partnership with the social media network to provide safer and more secure communities with the help of Delaware residents. The Delaware State Police can effectively share crime prevention and safety updates, free community safety events, and urgent alert notifications. The public can expect to receive posts related to crime and safety updates from the Delaware State Police on Nextdoor.

Nextdoor is a free private and secure social media website that is available to Delaware residents. The website is kept private and accessible only to residents of their neighborhood who have a verified address. Neighbors establish and self-manage their own Nextdoor.com website. The Delaware State Police will not be able to access resident’s websites, contact information, or content; we can only see the number of Crime and Safety Posts. As a result we can reach out to that community and offer help, direct resources and police services.

We encourage others to visit and research the website www.nextdoor.com and simply follow the easy steps to log in and after establishing their very own website visit help.nextdoor.com for any questions or concerns.

Please note Nextdoor.com is not the way to request emergency services, police services, report criminal or suspicious activity, file a report, etc. If you require emergency services, please call 911.

As our Nextdoor program has begun, it has proven to be an essential and well-adopted social media tool to share information for Delaware residents. Already more than 371 neighborhoods have launched their private and secured website. Currently 79 more neighborhoods have initiated their websites in Delaware with over 25,000 community members actively engaged within the Delaware State Police jurisdiction.

As a final note, under the direction of Colonel McQueen, our Delaware State Police Public Information Office and Community Outreach Unit will engage communities for Public Service Announcements, Free Community Safety Events, Crime Prevention and Safety meetings and much more.

“The Delaware State Police continues to pursue our goals of strengthening community partnerships, crime reduction, traffic safety and leveraging technology to improve our efficiency. Today the Delaware State Police is announcing the implementation of an innovative way to help keep our communities connected and safe. The Nextdoor platform will be implemented at no cost to tax payers. Nextdoor is a private social media network for neighborhoods which we hope will facilitate stronger and safer neighborhoods across the state.”

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

more ways to track you and what you say so they can use it against you...

Anonymous said...

...and no criminal will ever try to hack the system...

Anonymous said...

This sort of immediate social communication platform has already worked for our neighborhood, catching crooks within hours of notification and offering a previously missing dialogue with police.
It's also served to heighten neighborhood trust and vigilance, things that had fallen by the wayside with a change in neighborhood demographics.