Wednesday, October 15, 2014

Ride along with the Prince Rupert RCMP detachment through Facebook and twitter

Saturday night marks an interesting event for the local detachment of the Prince Rupert RCMP, as the police service for the region offers up the chance to follow along to dispatch calls through the social media portals of Facebook or twitter.

Yesterday, the RCMP outlined some background regarding the social media experiment for this weekend, which will take place between 9 PM and 3 AM on Saturday night/Sunday morning.

At that time the Prince Rupert RCMP will go live with tweets of the various calls that they attend to, providing information through the Prince Rupert Crime Stoppers Facebook Page and on twitter.

As part of the evening of tracking the work of the local detachment, Inspector Wayne Maughan, the Commander of the Prince Rupert Detachment and Community Liaison Officer Constable Matt Ericson will be attending the calls as well, allowing those logged in to the event to follow developments in real time.

It should provide an interesting snapshot for local residents as to the type of calls that members of the local detachment respond, in this case on what normally is one of the busiest nights of the week for local law enforcement.

The move is the first of its type for the local detachment with Constable Ericson outlining what the RCMP hopes will be achieved through the social media access to a night's work and the parameters that will be put in place during the six hours:

"This is an exciting initiative for the Prince Rupert RCMP Detachment. We are hoping that through this social media event we will be able to communicate directly with the citizens of Prince Rupert and the surrounding area. This is turn will create the platform for an open dialogue where questions may be asked directly to the Inspector or myself and we can provide a real time answer. Although we are prepared to field questions, the community must understand that during any discussions, protecting individual’s privacy and the integrity of investigations will be paramount."

For those who may want to look in on Saturday night, the process of access is fairly simple, you can send a friend request to the Prince Rupert Crime Stoppers page on Facebook or, click on follow on the Prince Rupert RCMP twitter feed.

More background on the Saturday night project can be found here.

How the project is received locally, could provide for more engagement between the local detachment and the community.

One item that the Prince Rupert detachment may wish to consider moving forward, is a daily listing of the calls for service that their officers deal with.

The Terrace detachment currently provides such an overview, which you can take a look at from our archive of Northwest Emergency Service files.




No comments:

Post a Comment