If you’re looking for timely and accurate information from city police on incidents happening in the community, there will soon be an app for that.
The North Bay Police Service has signed a partnership with an Alberta-based company involving the mass notification system called Alertable.
Police Chief Scott Tod says it’s an application that people can download to their smart devices and receive pushed information from the police service.
He says they looked to technology after an incident at a local school where police responded to reports of someone who was believed to be armed.
“We were told that the students knew more about what was going on in the school than the police did,” he says. “But, when we examined that we found that a lot of the messages were not accurate, they were false and just misleading from what was actually occurring in the school.”
Tod says this app provides police with the ability to share timely, accurate and relevant information, which he says was strained during the school incident.
He says they can provide information on where parents can gather or areas to avoid, but that’s not the only application.
“If we have an extreme weather event and streets are closed, power lines are down, we can push something out really quickly through multiple channels on social media,’ Tod adds.
He says North Bay Police are the first police service in Ontario to sign on with Alertable.
It’s expected to launch locally in April.
