The Orana-Mid Western Police District has taken a new approach to the way it communicates with the community about crime.
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Residents might have noticed an increase in social media posts by the police district, with daily updates about property crime and offences across the region.
This, according to district commander, superintendent Danny Sullivan is part of a new program introduced called IMPACT - Information Matters, Police and Community Together.
"Not only is my job to reduce crime, my job is to work with the community to reduce the fear of crime, and information matters when it comes to that," he said.
"If you reflect on crimes that impact most on our community, breaking into homes, stealing someone's car and taking things from someone's car, they are some of the crimes that have the biggest impact on people.
"What we're doing now through IMPACT is opening up the conversation and changing the conversation we're having with the community, and focusing on partnership and prevention, so that we can engage together so that we can help people from becoming a victim of crime in the first place.
"So you'll see now every day the Orana Mid-Western Police District publishes data about where crime is happening across the whole command."
With a flood of information posted regularly across social media from every day people, Supt Sullivan said this gave police a way to accurately inform people where crime was happening, what trends were occurring and offer crime prevention tips to not only reduce crime, but reduce the fear of crime.
"Social media is an outstanding tool for us to share information together, but if we don't share that impactful information it becomes the home of trolls," he said.
"Not only are we letting our community know what we're seeing, but we'll let them know the trends we're seeing," he said.
"A big trend we're seeing right now is people are leaving their cars unlocked and leaving valuables in their car.
"So again looking at our social media, you'll see one of the ways we're working with our community to combat this is we're asking them to do the three.
"The three are lock your car, remove your valuables and keep your car keys in a safe place, because they're the things we can do as a society that can prevent ourselves being a victim of crime in the first place."
So far he said the response to the increased social media presence was "outstanding".
"Our Facebook page has grown in over 300 per cent in the time that we've started this," he said.
"For example, our largest story so far had over 250,000 interactions.
"So that's over 250,000 people working together to reduce violence, crime and fear in our community."
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