I saw a Derbyshire Police reel last week that explained their aspiration that telephone calls to 101 are left to those people less able to use mobile devices to ‘live chat’ with the police.
Hmmmffff thought i, as someone that has cause to ring 101 reasonably regularly as a countryside ranger and sometimes sits on wait for over ten minutes (whilst the incident or person i was ringing about disappears).
So yesterday we rangers had cause to inform both South Yorkshire Police and Derbyshire Constabulary about something that we were informed might happen hereabouts. So i used Live Chat to inform both police forces. You have to give your name, email and mobile number.
In both instances the information was received quickly and the call handler e-chatted to me promptly. I was also sent an email address to send supporting imagery.
It just so happens that a ranger colleague was stood talking to a Derbyshire Constabulary police officer in a patrol car about 5 miles away whilst i was using Live Chat. He saw the intelligence appear on the screen in the car less than a minute or two after i had finished typing. The officers were then alerted to the issue and had access to the images. Same same for a South Yorkshire Police officer that a farmer spoke to later that day – he had also received the content of the Live Chat promptly and was actively patrolling one of the areas in question.
It works.
The police in rural areas and villagers that we work with talk about significant frustration that they don’t have all the jigsaw pieces about an incident in order to make further enquiries or an arrest – and oftentimes they know incidents were witnessed or that information is known but the public just don’t take the few minutes to offer up the information / evidence.
Try it. It’s quick and it works.