Supt. Don Spicer serves up a cup of crime prevention.
I realize with a title like this I’m opening myself up to a litany of jokes (insert cop eating donut joke here) but I thought it was worth the chance. This week I’d like to talk about our latest effort to fight crime through prevention. In my role as the Public Safety Officer for HRM I’ve been challenged with the task of finding new and innovative ways to get crime prevention messages out to the public.
We are at a point where brochures become white noise and get little notice. That’s why you’ve seen our messages on busses, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other media. We took our strategy to a new level this week through a partnership with Dalhousie University and Coburg Coffee as we jointly launched a program that will see crime prevention messages handed out on coffee sleeves. It’s our hope that getting the message out in a new and unique way will cause people to take notice and enable them to protect themselves from becoming a victim of crime.
I would like to thank Dalhousie University and Coburg Coffee for recognizing they have a role to play in public safety and eagerly jumping onboard with this initiative. It’s through partnerships like this that we can make a difference in our community.
Do you have any ideas on how we can get our messages out more effectively? Can you think of any unique partnerships that may contribute to community safety? As I mentioned earlier, Dalhousie University and Coburg Coffee recognize they have a role to play in public safety, do you? What can you do?
-Don
I think it’s great that HRP is using social media sites to connect with the public. Print media is becoming a thing of the past, and it’s nice to know our police department is keeping up with the ever evolving technology.
Way to go Don and hats off to the partnerships, A smart way to get the message out. Who doesn’t drink coffee.
Too bad there wasn’t a way of getting messages out through cell phone carriers to customers. We all, young and old, carry cell phones of some sort of technology. They are with us all the time and it would constantly remind us of public safety to see these messages flashing on our cell phone or other iphones and etc.
It’s funny you should say that, we are exploring options to do this now but we will need partners. Thanks for posting.
I just stumbled on this article and had an idea I thought I’d share. If you could partner with a gas station you could have someone’s attention. Most people skim over whatever is posted on the side of the pump while waiting for their vehicle to fill up. Any sort of advertising in such a location is bound to get noticed and read especially since peoples’ hands are preoccupied so they’re less likely to be on their cell or otherwise distracted.
It may also help deter potential drive-offs if the customer is reading about police/fighting crime.