Police can connect with residents via text and email alerts
LANSDALE — Starting Monday, there will be a new way for the Lansdale Police Department to get information out quickly to residents and businesses in and around the borough.
Borough Manager Timi Kirchner and police Sgt. Alex Kromdyk announced Wednesday that the department will be using Nixle Community Information Service to create, publish and deliver messages to anyone who subscribes, instantly via text message and/or email.
“We can do it for road closures, for special events, we can make weather-related alerts, armed subject (notifications), anything,” said Kromdyk.
The service is free to anyone who signs up, and free to the department, and users can sign up immediately by visiting www.Nixle.com to create an account and enter contact information, which is kept on secure servers — which Kirchner called another way for Lansdale to go above and beyond current borough communication channels including social media sites and email alerts.
“Nixle is the next step we are taking to keep in touch with our residents and business owners. We are in an immediate information age, and to many of the people we serve, their phones are as important as their keys or wallets,” Kirchner said.
“This is that next step of letting people know and understand critical things that are going on in our community,” she said.
Alert messages can be targeted directly to residents registered within a quarter-mile radius of any particular location, giving them the opportunity to receive trustworthy information relevant to their neighborhood. Those who sign up can decide which local agencies they want to receive information from and subscribers can also choose the way in which alerts are received.
Police Chief Robert McDyre and Kirchner encourage all Lansdale residents and business owners to sign up for the secure and free service.
“The safety of our citizens is paramount in
the Borough of Lansdale. Our community deserves the best when it comes to staying informed about incidents affecting them,” McDyre said.
“In my research, I’ve determined that Nixle is the service that best im- plements community notifications with the speed our citizens deserve and have come to expect,” he said.
Kromdyk said while the department has been looking into similar systems for some time, he sees Nixle as being particularly useful during events like a case when two children went missing for several hours from a home on Andover Road Monday afternoon. Police from Lansdale and Hatfield Township along with borough staff and local businesses searched for children for several hours in that area, finding their missing bicycles before ultimately locating the children in a nearby streambed.
In that case, according to Kromdyk, “the criteria didn’t fit an Amber Alert. (Pennsylvania) State Police govern Amber Alerts and are very strict on the guidelines, which require an abduction, and we were all thinking possible abduction but we had no evidence that there was an abduction at any point during this whole incident.”
“With Nixle, man, I can get that word out real quick, and inform the public that there’s a missing kid,” or whatever the incident may be, he said, and he and other authorized officers could provide real-time updates from incident scenes if necessary.
During Wednesday night’s council meeting, Kromdyk, Kirchner and council President Jason Van Dame all thanked the numerous police officers, borough employees and employees of local businesses who helped out in that search Monday, and Kromdyk singled out in particular A.L. Finishing of Schwab Road, whose employees ultimately located the missing children after the business shut down to help the search.
“What a great story. Too often, you hear the other side of that, and it’s great to have the outcome that we did. Thanks to you, and to everyone that was involved that day,” Van Dame said.
For more information or to register for the Nixle alert system, visit www.Nixle.com; for more on the Lansdale Borough Police Department and its activities, visit www. Lansdale.org, search for “Lansdale Borough Police Department” on Facebook or follow @LansdalePA on Twitter.