Police Dept. Can Mass Text Residents for Free

Information from the police department is now at your fingertips 24/7. Emergency alerts, traffic advisories, missing persons reports and public safety announcements can all be sent to your cell phone or email inbox—for free.

How? The partnered with private company Nixle Connect to communicate important updates with residents. More than 4,800 government agencies, including the San Mateo Police Department, use Nixle to communicate with over 700,000 citizens. Redwood City’s 79,000 residents now have the option to join them.

“It would be negligent for the police not to make use of [social media] to reach the people that we are empowered to serve,” said Police Chief JR Gamez in a statement. “Meeting the public where they live, on Nixle, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, is having an effect similar to putting officers in communities on foot patrol, it creates a partnership.”

The police department began exploring the use of Nixle around 2010 when they began employing other social media like Twitter and Facebook. Though these channels were important, Captain Chris Cesena highlighted that Nixle was purely for putting out information, not a two-way communication system.

As all Redwood City departments find ways in their budgets, this free alert system was “very attractive,” Cesena said.

Nixle currently offers its basic services to public entities for free but offers paid services as well, such as Nixle Interconnect, an internal communication service that allows agencies to securely build a hierarchy structure through communication texts. Cesena said though they are not using it now, it appealed to him because the department could then internally send group texts to certain police officers.

Nixle took a year to obtain a partnership with the National Law Enforcement Telecommunication System (NLETS), an interstate justice and public safety network system owned by the fifty states. Nixle’s servers are stored at the NLETS facility for maximum security, according to Nixle’s VP of Agency Relations, Travis Scott. 

The police department found Nixle appealing because it could disseminate its messages across many web-based platforms simultaneously to keep the public informed instantaneously, Gamez added.

“Twitter and Facebook are great but those are for friends and family to communicate,” Scott explained. “We decided to build a similar tool that was a secure platform over different avenues.”

Redwood City residents can sign up to receive free, real-time safety information by texting their zip code to 888777 or by visiting www.nixle.com. Once registered, users can customize the types of alerts they wish to receive via text, email, and online.

“It’s all voluntary,” Cesena emphasized. “You don’t have to sign up.”

In 2011, participating agencies sent 81,200 messages, or 6,766 per month. Over 24.3 million SMS text messages were sent for an average of 2 million each month, and over 44.7 million e-mails were sent, over 3.7 million each month.

By partnering with technology company Syniverse, Nixle can send up to 500 text messages per second.

For more news about Redwood City and surrounding areas, including unincorporated San Mateo County, follow us on Twitter and "like" us on Facebook.

Get Patched in daily by signing up for our newsletter.