By Ryan Boetel
Albuquerque Journal
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Albuquerque police are joining another social media platform to send neighborhood-specific crime prevention tips to local residents.
Officials from the city and the police department announced Tuesday that APD joined Nextdoor.com. It’s a social media website where people are grouped together by address. Unlike other types of social media, people on Nextdoor only have access to forums for people who live by them. It does not cost any money for the city, or local residents, to join Nextdoor.
Victoria Godwin, who helped start a Nextdoor forum for the Four Hills Village neighborhoods, said topics the neighborhood has discussed online include lost pets, garage sales, annoying door-to-door salesmen and property crime trends.
“There’s good posts and menial posts,” she said.
About a third of Albuquerque neighborhoods have residents on Nextdoor.
Albuquerque Police Chief Gorden Eden said police may use the website to send messages directly to neighbors about a missing child or crime trend in their area. An example might be an alert about a thief who targets people warming up their cars during cold mornings, which has recently happened in Albuquerque, Eden said.
Eden said police will only be able to provide information to other users, and that the department won’t have access to a neighborhood’s discussion topics.
Jeremie Beebe, the partnerships director for Nextdoor, said the website was intended to create a venue for an online neighborhood group. Police departments in recent years have started creating their own accounts to communicate directly with residents. Eden said major police departments across the country, including Denver, Dallas, Houston and Phoenix, already are active on the website.
Nextdoor “will allow us to communicate directly with the neighbors, in real time, and provide them with real information that is important, specific to their neighborhoods,” Eden said. “Rather than us having to depend on the local media or other sources ... we can pass this information out through Nextdoor.”
APD is involved in other social media platforms as well. More than 6,300 people “like” the department’s Facebook page. And APD has 11,700 Twitter followers.
Copyright 2014 the Albuquerque Journal