Monday, September 15, 2008 5:44 AM EDT By William Kaempffer, Register Staff
Monday, September 15, 2008 5:44 AM EDT
By William Kaempffer, Register Staff
NEW HAVEN — The city is seeking money to build an interactive Web site for the Police Department aimed at improving communication and dialogue between neighborhood groups and across the city.
The concept is to create a new platform on which Block Watches, members of Community Management Teams and residents at-large can learn about happenings, receive information from police, exchange information about neighborhood problems and post pictures and accomplishments.
“The idea is to create sort of a conversation space that the neighborhood that each district could use,” said city Chief Administrative Officer Robert Smuts.
The city is seeking a $142,000 federal grant to get it started, so there’s no guarantee of money, but politicians and community leaders agree there is a great need.
“Basic minimum, we need interaction between the individual management teams,” said George Page, of the Quinnipiac East Management Team. Currently, he maintained, there isn’t adequate communication from the Police Department about crime.
The city does send e-mail alerts when crime trends are detected.
“I keep getting told, ‘Yes, your name is on the list,’ but I never get any e-mail,” he said at an aldermanic hearing. “It’s a little disheartening, because I rely on that information to spread information to the rest of the community. We need something. We need something soon.”
Many Block Watches and Community Management Teams, the neighborhood organizations created to work with police and other city departments in New Haven’s 10 districts, maintain individual e-mail lists, including some with hundreds of addresses, where they blast out information about news or crime. Page’s list has about 100.
The idea, said Neighborhood Services Officer Joseph Avery, is to harness and build on that network and provide discussion space where neighborhood police can relay information and community members can, say, post pictures from their neighborhood cleanup.
The plan is to have a main page open to the public and individual pages with password protection for each of the city’s districts.
There was some talk at an aldermanic meeting that Neighborhood Services would have to approve community postings, but Smuts said the department would serve more as a facilitator of the site, rather than, “pardon the pun, policemen of it.”
Can the one-person unit handle the additional workload of moderating and populating the site, asked Alderman Gerald Antunes.
At this time, Smuts said, there is no immediate plan to increase staffing, but it’s something that could be revisited at a later time.
The Boston Police Department launched a similar site in 2006, although its version doesn’t have a community blogging component. It’s piloting a more interactive site in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood and, if it’s successful, the hope is to create sites citywide, said Joe Porcelli, a program coordinator for the Boston Police Department.