The Leon County Sheriff’s Office is promising a new social media app means they’ll be right next door.
The Sheriff’s office is already on twitter and Facebook, but they’re expanding their presence by joining a platform called Nextdoor.
“It’s always important for the sheriff’s office to embrace innovative ways to reach out to our neighbors and the very people that we serve in this community,” Leon County Sheriff Mike Wood says.
He likes Nextdoor because it can help his deputies focus their efforts.
“It’s a powerful tool because it gives the sheriff’s office—aside from the neighborhoods it gives the Leon county sheriff’s office the ability to target communications,” he says. “We can communicate with individual neighborhoods, we can communicate with geographical areas.”
Chris O’Neal helps manage the group for the Woodbriar neighborhood.
“I think that Nextdoor is technology’s answers to making neighbors neighborly again,” O’Neal says.
Similar neighborhood or community groups have sprung up on places like Facebook to host parties, sell furniture, and share information. But O’Neal prefers Nextdoor.
“But I think that Nextdoor was innovative in that they said that we’re going to use not only all the principles of Facebook, but we’re going to make sure that it’s community based,” O’Neal says, “and that community is actually defined by geographic regions whatever the community is, its defined by those borders.”
Evelyn Gonzalez from Lafayette Oaks and Earl Campos from Parkside Park Terrace manage Nextdoor groups for their communities, too, and they echo O’Neal’s sentiment.
Sheriff Wood says even if the program new to his department it has already been taken up by many people in the wider community.
“Currently in the Tallahassee Leon county area there are 103 neighborhoods partnering with next door, that’s 51 percent of our community.”
The private networks are based on residency. Posts aren’t visible to search engines, and law enforcement agencies can only view posts unless they are made publicly.
