Wiltshire Police use an email alert system called Community Messaging, also known as Neighbourhood Alert, across Wiltshire and Swindon to provide real time information to subscribing residents and businesses.
This is a free service and once subscribed you can choose what sort of alert to receive and how to receive them. This way the alerts will be tailored specifically to your interests and delivered by email, text or phone.
Community Messaging allows Wiltshire Police, and carefully selected partners, to help keep communities better informed about police and crime updates affecting their local area. The messages can even be sent to individual postcodes.
Although Wiltshire Police is the main source of information the system is also used by Dorset and Wiltshire Fire and Rescue, Wiltshire and Swindon Neighbourhood Watch, Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner, Gas Emergency Service and Action Fraud (the national centre for fraud and cybercrime). All these partners provide relevant information to help keep you safe and secure.
You can respond directly to messages and rate the value/relevance of alerts on a scale of 1-5. Your feedback can be most useful to provide first hand intelligence relating to alerts but also to allow us to assess the effectiveness of the system so we keep messages and alerts relevant.
The relevance of alerts is controlled by users through the selection of specific schemes on the system; Neighbourhood watch is one popular choice but there are also groups for Community Speed Watch, Youth Clubs and Groups, Church Watch, Horse Watch, Farm Watch and many others. All can be selected or deselected as required and all have the ability for you to feed intelligence to crime prevention partners.
It should be emphasised that Community Messaging is not a way of reporting crimes – always call 999 in an emergency or 101 in a non-emergency situation.
Community Messaging doesn’t replace the social media activity that the force uses to reach out to communities but works alongside it to make sure that messages are received in a timely way.
With changes to the algorithms that the leading social media platforms use to distribute information you are possibly seeing far fewer of the posts issued than you did five years ago. By signing up to Community Messaging you will be sure to receive the information directly. www.wiltsmessaging.co.uk