GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — The Grand Rapids Police Department has a new alert messaging system called Nixle.
It will let you know about emergency events in real time. The information will be sent straight to your phone.
The system will send text or email messages with information.
To sign up, you send GrandRapids to 888-777. You can then customize it, by typing in your area code.
You can also choose what type of alerts you receive and even turn off the alerts during certain times of the day.
“We want to make this so that it’s customizable. Community members, in today’s day and age, are so used to information at their fingertips and they have a choice of how they want to receive that,” said Grand Rapids Police Sgt. Cathy Williams.
Williams says the Dantzler shooting and events like it are what sparked the need for a service like this.
She says adding that Nixle is a benefit for officers and citizens.
“Say there’s an officer-involved shooting or an officer fatality. We want officers to know about that first before they read about it in the news or on social media. So, this will allow us to internally send a message to all employees very quickly,” Williams said. “The other component to this is the external messaging. We need to be able to report first and accurate emergency information to the community.”
GRPD pays $12,000 annually for the service.
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