Through Nixle, students and Kirksville residents can sign up online to receive updates from the Kirksville Police Department's four categories of information: alert, advisory, community and traffic.
Detective Jeremy Cordray said people can sign up to receive any of the categories by text, e-mail or a mix of the two.
Kirksville Police Department started the new program at the beginning of this year after they expressed interest in using social networking to reach citizens. They have a Twitter account, but Cordray said they were looking for something that better fit their needs.
"They ensured us it's a secure system – there's nothing to hack into," Cordray said. "One of the reasons we went with Nixle was because, unlike Twitter, you can send messages and have people respond back. We weren't too comfortable with that."
Cordray said they usually send out at least three texts a week. On Mondays they send weekend police activities including arrests, on Wednesdays it's fugitive of the week and on Fridays, statistics from the week. He said these are the basic three, but they will post more if other content is available.
One popular post has been the fugitive of the week. Cordray said every week since they started using Nixle, they've posted the details including a picture of a person of interest in the area.
"Usually within the day we send it out, we either know where the person is, or they've been arrested, " he said. "People send e-mails, call the police department, we also have a tip line which is 627-BUST."
He said since they started fugitive of the week, they've caught all but one or two of the criminals. Once the fugitive is apprehended, they send out another message for a resolution.
The fugitive of the week is under the "advisories" category. Usually this category contains events that happened in the past and are not time sensitive.
Cordray said the "alerts" category would be the most important for students, because it contains important information about emergencies, missing persons and burglary suspects.
Another category is the "community" category. Cordray said this is where they put information about Kirksville events like parades and other events that don't pertain to investigation. He said the last category, "traffic," hasn't been used much because there hasn't been a need for it, but he said they would use it in the event of a major accident.
Tom Johnson, director of Truman's Department of Public Safety, said the University is using the same emergency text messaging system as last year. The system was created by Truman's Information Technologies department. Johnson said they only used it for an emergency once last year during an incident at Dobson Hall, when a student adviser mistook airsoft guns for real guns, causing the residence hall to be locked down.
"I definitely encourage students to use it," Johnson said. "Last year I was able to fire off the message right there from my Blackberry as the event was happening, so it's one way to notify people. Obviously it's not going to catch everybody, [but] we're going to do everything we can to notify people and hope people tell others."
He said they will test the text messaging system in the next couple months, so he encourages students to sign up through their TruView account.
Senior Eric Hughes follows Kirksville Police Department on Twitter but said he was unaware of their new Nixle account.
"It's very easy to send something out instantly in a mass form," Hughes said. "I know a lot of people have mobile internet access so it's a lot easier for them to get that information."
He said his mom raised him to be cautious, so he follows police departments on Twitter in Kirksville and in his hometown near St. Louis.
"I'm subscribed to the University's texts updates," Hughes said. " I know it was kind of a big deal last year when the Dobson incident happened. … I had friends that lived in Dobson, I liked that I knew that they [weren't] in danger to make sure they were OK. I felt like that helped a lot."
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