Yesterday, we joined with the City Manager’s and Mayor’s offices to officially launch Nextdoor in Kansas City. Nextdoor is a free and private social network for neighborhoods. On Nextdoor, neighbors create private web sites for their neighborhoods where they can ask questions, get to know one another, and exchange local advice and recommendations.
Once I heard about it, I immediately recognized the benefit Nextdoor could have to police and community safety. It can serve as a virtual neighborhood watch.
One of my primary goals as police chief has been for our officers to build positive relationships with the residents they serve. Nextdoor provides us the opportunity to augment those existing relationships online while fostering new ones.
We are training more than 80 patrol officers and sergeants to use and manage this system. They will be responsible for communicating with people in the geographic areas they police. They know the concerns and opportunities in these areas already and are best suited to interact with the residents they serve. The officers will be able to post information pertaining to their whole patrol division or down to their beats.
We don’t intend for Nextdoor to be a replacement for face-to-face contact, but rather a complement to what we’re already doing. We look forward to residents being able to provide us information about safety concerns in their neighborhood and working with them to address those concerns.
Similarly, Nextdoor will serve as a great tool for us in soliciting assistance. As police, we can only do so much. We need the eyes, ears and cooperation of everyone to make this a safer city. A whole neighborhood of people watching for criminal activity or a suspect is usually far more effective at deterring and solving crime than anything our officers or detectives could do.
Nextdoor is another tool in our social media belt. Our police department has had great success with it and in 2013 was named the fourth-most social media friendly police department in the nation.
More than 110 Kansas City neighborhoods already are using Nextdoor, and I invite you to head over to www.nextdoor.com to sign up! (You can also do it on your Android or iPhone through Nextdoor's free app.)
One of my primary goals as police chief has been for our officers to build positive relationships with the residents they serve. Nextdoor provides us the opportunity to augment those existing relationships online while fostering new ones.
We are training more than 80 patrol officers and sergeants to use and manage this system. They will be responsible for communicating with people in the geographic areas they police. They know the concerns and opportunities in these areas already and are best suited to interact with the residents they serve. The officers will be able to post information pertaining to their whole patrol division or down to their beats.
We don’t intend for Nextdoor to be a replacement for face-to-face contact, but rather a complement to what we’re already doing. We look forward to residents being able to provide us information about safety concerns in their neighborhood and working with them to address those concerns.
Similarly, Nextdoor will serve as a great tool for us in soliciting assistance. As police, we can only do so much. We need the eyes, ears and cooperation of everyone to make this a safer city. A whole neighborhood of people watching for criminal activity or a suspect is usually far more effective at deterring and solving crime than anything our officers or detectives could do.
Nextdoor is another tool in our social media belt. Our police department has had great success with it and in 2013 was named the fourth-most social media friendly police department in the nation.
More than 110 Kansas City neighborhoods already are using Nextdoor, and I invite you to head over to www.nextdoor.com to sign up! (You can also do it on your Android or iPhone through Nextdoor's free app.)
Send comments to kcpdchiefblog@kcpd.org.
