Our local police department has recently signed up with Silent Partner Alert, a service that allows police departments to send e-mail and pager/cell/PDA notifications to subscribers about emergencies. Subscribers can be notified of road closings, weather emergencies, police emergencies, and other such things. I’ve subscribed for several weeks and the traffic level seems just right (though a flood warning received yesterday was a bit premature).
It’s somewhat pricey for the police themselves, running $90/month for a population of less than 50,000 people, but it’s free for the subscribing community. My major complaint is that the organization’s web site has got to be one of the worst I’ve seen in the last five years. It defines “ass ugly” and looks like it was designed by a high school kid just starting to learn HTML.
Nevertheless, it’s a useful service for smaller communities.
Posted in Technology