VIDEO: Oxford Police Department Talks Social Media

OXFORD, Miss. (WCBI)- Social media is one of the biggest platforms for communication people use.

Now, area law enforcement is getting on board and using it to their advantage.

The police department said they weren’t sure, at first, how the community would react to their social media accounts.

They didn’t want to incriminate, but just communicate.

“We have so many people that come up and talk to us and ask who’s the person tweeting, or we love your twitter, and it’s just a great conversation starter,” says Major Jeff McCutchen.

The Oxford Police Department is known for it’s social media accounts.

“It’s all about transparency, you know if everyone can see that we’re an open department, we want you to know what we’re doing, we want you to understand why we’re doing what we do. So when we go an engage you in the community, you understand we’re not there to punish, and we’re just trying to make this a safe place and that’s our goal,” says McCutchen.

McCutchen is one of the department’s Tweeters, he says it’s opened the lines of communication more than he ever thought possible.

“What we found is sometimes it’s hard to maybe come up to an officer and discuss topics and concerns but through social media it’s a little easier and less intrusive so I can send a direct message or comment and our goal really is just dialogue, and we feel like we can police better and we can have a better relationship with the community if there’s a conversation, and we thought ‘hey, this is just a simple way to get a conversation started.’ and it’s just kind of blossomed from there,” says McCutchen.

He says their followers have become their own personal task force.

“Not only the communication side, not only the community side but the enforcement side. You know our detectives, when they have trouble identifying someone- we get as much information or a picture and typically within 30 min you know our Facebook followers or twitter followers will know who that is and they’ll send us the info and we close those cases,” says McCutchen.

They combine entertainment and education in their tweets and posts. This lets the community know, they’re people too.

“Keep it professional but also keep it real life. You know, we want people to understand that we’re not robots. You know cops are not so structured that we can’t have a good time and be ourselves and we feel like the community has responded well to that and to understand that hey, we like the same things you like, we get aggravated at the same things you get aggravated about,” says McCutchen.

He says making the department a social media account was one of their better ideas.

“We’re a 75 officer department, we can only see so many people in a given day but through 20 or 30 thousand followers, we put that out and they share it and before we know it, we’ve reached the masses in just a click of a button,” says McCutchen.

The Twitter account isn’t monitored 24-7. The department wants to remind followers that should still use 911 in case of an emergency.