tip411 Agency Spotlight, Uncategorized

Victoria Police Team Up with 7-Eleven for “Operation Chill”

Think tip411 can only be used to receive tips and share public safety alerts?  Think again.

Departments large and small use tip411 in creative ways to announce programs and events directly to residents:

“Operation Chill is a program that the Victoria Police Department recently became involved in, partnering with 7-11, to create positive police interaction with the youth in our community.

Officers with the Victoria Police Department will be handing out “tickets” to young people in our community who are observed being good citizens.  This can include many things such as riding their bicycle safely with the proper safety equipment, using crosswalks, following the law, helping others, volunteering time in their community, using their manners, or other things that young people do to be good citizens of our community.”

Learn more and read the full announcement from the Victoria Police Department.

tip411 Agency Spotlight, In The News

El Paso Creates Special Tip Keyword During Pope’s Visit to Promote tip411

The Vatican and the Catholic Diocese of El Paso announced that Pope Francis would be visiting Juárez on February 17, 2016.

During the visit, he traveled a route adjacent to the El Paso-Juárez border for a Mass scheduled at the former Juárez fairgrounds.

Due to the proximity of the motorcade route and the Mass to the U.S.-Mexico border, the City of El Paso created a special keyword to request the public’s help sharing tips related to the Pope’s visit.See the following press release from the El Paso Police Department:

Report Suspicious Activity to El Paso Police Department by Texting Keyword “POPE”

Date:  2/8/2016

EL PASO, The El Paso Police Department is seeking the public’s help by reporting suspicious activity to the Department’s Tip411 line. Tip411 allows the public to share important public safety information anonymously with the police department by sending a secure text message about crimes or suspicious activity. The Department is launching a special, keyword dedicated to the upcoming Papal visit.

If you have information of suspicious activity or a crime relating to the Pope’s upcoming visit and have a cell phone may send an anonymous tip to El Paso PD by Texting POPE and their message/tip to 847411(tip411).  Anonymous web tips can also be submitted right on the Police Department’s Facebook page or https://www.elpasotexas.gov/pope915/tip411

tip411 Admin Resources, Agency Spotlight

What Made for a Successful Launch in Onondaga County, NY?

To announce tip411’s arrival at 20 agencies in the Syracuse area, District Attorney William Fitzpatrick did three important things:

  1. Held a press conference and invited chiefs from local departments to attend to show their support for the system and promote its use to local media outlets.
  2. Produced posters and flyers showing agency-specific tip411 keywords that participating agencies could hand out, give to business, hang in city buildings, and use on their social media sites and webpages.
  3. Participated in ongoing promotion – Aside from the initial press conference, the DA and Syracuse Police Chief gave one-on-one interviews to media outlets in the days following the launch to assure continued coverage of the new system in order to reach more members of the public.

See More:

Video – District Attorney Fitzpatrick discusses tip411 outreach
Video -Onondaga County Lauches tip411

 

tip411 Agency Spotlight

“For the dollars, the effort, the functionality, and the outcome…it’s money well spent”

tip411 interviewed Chief Paul Schnell of the Maplewood Police Department in Maplewood, Minnesota.

 

Q: Tell us about Maplewood and your department (how many residents, how many sworn, etc.).
A: Maplewood is a community of 40,000 people. It’s a first-ring suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota and is home to the world headquarters of 3M Corporation.

We are a full-service law enforcement agency with 53 sworn officers and our department is in a unique position because of the higher growth in urban type crime we are witnessing – gang related crime, homicides, assaults – but also our neighborhoods where there are quality of life issues – parking, disorderly people in parks, etc.

Q: How is the tip411 system used in your community?
A: We’ve used tip411 for about 2 years now and it’s really been an important tool for our department.

We have the tips app for smartphones, the text a tip line, and have the information on our Facebook page and website.

We’ve had five homicides in the last year, and in each of those cases, and every major crime in our community, we’ve used tip411 in a significant way. These crimes create high levels of fear in the community, so tip411 is a great way allow people to communicate with us.

Q: How is tip411 administered in your department (responsibilities, protocols, etc.)?
A: We have a county-based dispatch center, so dispatchers can’t be used to manage tips around the clock as they are busy responding to calls. Instead, inside our department we have a group of five administrative and investigative staff that can check and respond to tips we receive through the tip411 dashboard that has gotten better over time at helping us manage tips.

Knowing that we can’t monitor and respond to tips 24/7, we’ve publicized over and over that this is system is not monitored 24 hours a day and is not a replacement for emergency types of messages.

Q: What have you done to brand and promote the tip411 system in Maplewood?
A: Several things have been successful for us in terms of promotion. As I said, we post information to Facebook, Twitter, and every crime release we send out when we’re looking for the public’s help to solve crimes.

But we’ve also thought of creative ways like teaming up with the city’s public works department around pothole reporting. We put out a release asking community members to use tip411 to text us locations of potholes, and to pictures if they wanted. We received many reports and forwarded them directly to public works.

Of course this isn’t typically what a police department would focus on, but we view potholes and other types of non-crime reports as quality of life stuff that is important to people. And, for us, getting people to use tip411 to report potholes has been a mechanism for us to get people to use the system and become comfortable if/when they need to report more sensitive or crime-related information.

We’re also beginning to roll a program around human trafficking. Domestic trafficking and sexual exploitation of young people is an important issue and we’ve worked with tip411 to have an additional keyword (“SAFE”) to use in partnership with a domestic violence shelter that provides resources for victims. When people text tips using this keyword, program staff at a 24 hour domestic violence hotline and they manage and respond to those tips.

We are encouraging young people and people who may know about people who are being exploited to send information so we can try to make contact.

Because tip411 is not just a passive system, but one that allows us to actually engage in conversations with people, its been helpful for people to gauge whether or not they can trust us or a program.

Q: Any notable tips/arrests credited to tip411 that come to mind?
A: We had a homicide this past July and the suspect took off and left the area. We had no idea where he went but we published information about the crime with our tip411 information on Facebook, Twitter, our website, and in press releases to local media. Low and behold we got an anonymous text tip that the suspect was in a city, first in Wisconsin, and then in Illinois.

Our investigators used tip411 to engage in a conversation with the tipster – it was trust building. The tipster needed to know we weren’t going to be reckless with information and expose them.

After several days of back and forth, the tipster provided information to help us identify the location of the suspect who was then apprehended.

tip411 led us to that person through an engaged tipster based on the communications ability the system offers and that suspect is now pending trial for murder.

Q: So, why tip411?
A: For us, it’s a good value – It’s not super expensive, it’s simple to use, and simple to implement. It provides a good backend for us to manage and monitor so you not only see the tips but also who they were assigned to, if they are active, etc.

Q: Anything you would tell other agencies considering tip411?
A: I don’t believe there’s ever been a time in recent history where its as important as it is right now for law enforcement to lean in and provide every mechanism for people to communicate and engage with us.

This is especially true for people who may not trust us as much.

tip411 helps a conversation to develop and build that trust that’s necessary.

For the dollars, the effort, the functionality, and the outcome…it’s money well spent.

tip411 Agency Spotlight

“Fighting Crime is a Partnership” with tip411 & Leander Police

tip411 interviewed Assistant Chief of Police Jeffrey R. Hayes of the Leander Police Department, who is a member of the coordination team in charge of the department’s tip411 system in Leander, Texas.  For more information about how Leander is promoting their tip411 system, watch the Public Service Announcement they created to share with the media, public, and online.

Q: Tell us about Leander and your department.
A: Leander is one of the fastest growing cities in one of the fastest growing regions of the United States. We are located just north of Austin, Texas in what was once considered a rural farming community. Due to steady growth and a healthy economy, Leander is transitioning from its rural roots to a vibrant and self-sufficient city. At present, our population is approximately 38,000 and growing. We are projected to top 100,000 in the next ten years. To put it in perspective, Leander alone has 10% of all new housing starts in the Central Texas region.

Q: Why tip411?
A: A number of on-line organizations have rated Leander as one of the “Top Ten Safest” communities in Texas and one of the “Top 100 Safest” cities in America. We want to keep it that way. With growth comes the challenging task of staying intimately connected with our community in profound and meaningful ways. Communicating with our citizens in ways that foster strong relationships and staying connected in a way that make our department more focused and effective. In that regard, tip411was, well, it was a no brainer. Our department is acutely aware that we cannot be everywhere at once and we rely heavily on the community being our eyes and ears. tip411’s anonymous tip and alert features gives us a communication tool that gives a voice to those who might otherwise remain silent. An important aspect of good communication is simply listening, and the tip411 system allows us to do just that – listen. Not everyone feels comfortable talking with the police, no matter how good your relationship might be with your community. tip411 allows us to hear crime information and concerns we might not otherwise be able to hear.

Q: Why do you think branding and promoting tip411 is so important?
A: From the beginning, we understood the importance of the tip411 tool, but we also realized that our community must know it is available to them and how easy it is to use. We are a “smart phone society,” and part of a new generation that has multiple tools right at their fingertips on a device that is so powerful that it’s probably unfair to even call it a “phone.” The service and technology interface that we hold in our hands can be used for a myriad of functions, well beyond voice communication. We are an instantaneous information and communication society and there are growing expectations that services, including those offered by law enforcement, can be accessed via that powerful handheld device. tip411’s interface is as easy as an app, a text, or connecting over the internet. Members of our community must know it is available, that it is easy to use, and for those who’s anonymity is important – that it is just that – anonymous.

Q: What have you done to brand and promote the tip411 system in Leander?
A: To get the word out to our citizens, we knew that we must take the product and customize it to meet our department’s needs and the community’s expectations. We knew that we had to approach promotion, well the whole program in fact, in our own “style.” We practice a partnership based policing philosophy, where we strive to develop essential relationships with members of our community necessary to accomplish effective police work. With that, we knew that tip411 had a natural place in that partnership. Hence the lead line on all of our promotional materials is “Fighting Crime is a Partnership.” We paid very close attention to the strategies used in other communities who have successfully integrated tip411 into their toolbox, and we took those approaches and tinkered with them until they were unique, or at least had a “Leander” style that was easily identifiable. People that live in this community know that they enjoy a high quality of life and a low crime rate. They also know that they want to keep that way. We felt that it was valuable to show how using tip411 and the alert system could play a big part in keeping Leander “a great place to live, work, and play.”

Q: Anything you would tell other agencies considering tip411?
A: Let me address one challenge that we will wrestle with for the foreseeable future and that is the challenge that all law enforcement agencies face – money. Many law enforcement agencies have access to funding that we do not have now, but may have in the future. We can’t wait for the future to get the word out on tip411. For it to remain a valuable and effective tool, we must keep pushing its availability and value out to the public as often as possible. I will continue to watch how other agencies approach this same challenge. I also must confess that I have already “borrowed” and customized several ideas from other agencies that I thought would help us here in Leander. We will continue to seek alternative funding sources, donations, sponsors, and grants, to come up with the most cost effective way to keep tip411 in the public eye. We will make tip411 part of all department requests for assistance from the public and a prominent part of our crime prevention / community service programs, while definitely maximizing exposure through social media as often as possible.

Q: Is there anything that I haven’t asked that you would like to tell other agencies?
A: To paraphrase Sir Robert Peel, “we are the public, and the public are the police.” We are paid to do that which is incumbent upon every citizen in the interest of their community’s welfare and existence. The tip411 system is an interface that allows the Leander public to participate in policing their community. They can contribute to the partnership necessary for Leander to remain a great place to live. Those that have a true concern for their community are hungry to help, and they want to help us keep our crime rate low and quality of life high. Before we had our “hard launch,” we started placing the tip411 logos and icons on our Facebook page and webpage. With no fanfare or promotion, we began getting a few neighborhood concern tips. That happened with little or no effort on our part. Just think how powerful the tip411 system will be when we begin to promote it and make it an integral part of the way we do business in Leander.