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The Mountain View Police Department is introducing a smartphone application and increasing its social media presence in an effort to provide better service to the community, said spokeswoman Liz Wylie.

The app allows users to check on the latest police department news, submit anonymous tips, ask a question, look up department contact information and upload location-tagged photos, among other features. The department has partnered with WiredBlue, a company out of Peabody, Mass., creator of the MyPD app for both Android and iOS smartphone operating systems.

“We hope that the people who live, work and play in Mountain View download and use the app to communicate with the department,” Scott Vermeer, Mountain View’s chief of police, said in a statement. “There are many topics for crime tips and various forms already built into the app to make things easy for the user. We are attempting to remove much of the guess work and allow the public to conveniently choose a topic and make sure that message gets to the correct person.”

In addition to the smartphone app, the department has also created a Facebook Fan Page and a “Chief’s Blog” for Vermeer to communicate directly with the community about a variety of public safety-related topics.

While residents of Mountain View may report crimes to the police department using any of these social media outlets, as well as the department’s Twitter account, people must still call 911 in an emergency.

For more information on all these tools, you may find the department’s press release by clicking here.

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1 Comment

  1. I would like a little less worrying about the online community and more about the one I live in. If I have to report another property crime and hear that they don’t consider it serious enough to respond to or that they don’t have enough manpower I may go crazy. My insurance company sure seems to consider the damage worth raising my rates!

  2. “residents of Mountain View may report crimes to the police department using … the department’s Twitter account”

    What is the world coming to?

  3. And dialing 911 is too difficult for people now? Or is this just another useless use of a useless technology that really did not need to be invented or marketed in the first place, so the company is running around trying to convince gullible city department heads to spend more of the taxpayers money on this non-essential technology?

  4. I like it. I like it a lot. Insofar as crime prevention is concerned, more avenues for information and crime reporting is better.

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