Social media connects police with community quickly

ByMatthew Crane Reading Time: 3 minutes

Jasper Police Department is tweeting.

The department announced the addition of a new Twitter account, @JasperCityPD, Wednesday afternoon. Its first tweets hit the street at about 10 a.m. Here’s one.

Assistant Chief of Police Nathan Schmitt and the department’s administrative assistant Courtney Greener will be posting to the account, according to Chief Michael Bennett.

Jasper joins the ranks of many police departments locally as well as across the country who have embraced social media. One of our most active local law enforcement Twitter accounts is ran by Sgt. Philip Hensley, the public information officer with the Indiana State Police Jasper post.

Hensley tweets at @ISPJasper and his tweets range from informational to amusing. Hensley isn’t shy about posting his thoughts on law enforcement incidents as well as a sporting events, and the account has added several hundred followers since he took it over in October of 2013.

“I have found it is invaluable,” he said about social media.

Hensley is at the Indiana State Fair right now. Here is a recent tweet.

The impact of social media for law enforcement has been the creation of better community relations. “It is a way to really connect with the community. People see me and say ‘I saw your Twitter post the other day and that was really neat,'” Hensley said. “And it’s a conversation starter. It makes us seem more approachable.”

Hensley runs a Facebook page for the post also and he recently started a YouTube.com account to begin sharing some videos. He and Sgt. Todd Ringle, the public information officer for the Evansville post, pushed for the Indiana State Police to adopt social media across the state. “Ringle and I went to the superintendent and showed him what we were doing and got approval,” he said. “We then got together with all the other PIOs [public information officers] and trained them on using Twitter and Facebook.”

Jasper Police Department plans on using Twitter to keep the public notified of service announcements, special events, street closures, and even incidents that may impact the public. “Like the power outage that occurred yesterday,” Bennett said. “It would have been good if we had it up yesterday and then, instead of people swamping the police department with phone calls, we would have got that information out.”

Bennett said they chose Twitter as an avenue to reach out to the community due to the simplicity of the social network. A post can only be 140 characters in length and hashtags are used to string posts together or to gain relevance with major events or news items.

Twitter also allows tweets from accounts the user follows to be sent to phones as text updates. A user could enable mobile or text alerts when the Jasper Police Department tweets and stay up to date on any information they put out on the network. An advantage over Facebook.

“This is a work in progress; it is new to us,” Bennett said. “This is a good way to reach out and get in touch with the community and get involved. Hopefully, they will see it as a positive thing.”

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