VIDEO: A Tweet To CPD Leads To A Policy Change

COLUMBUS, Miss. (WCBI) – A Columbus resident’s complaint with the police department is resolved on social media.

The complaint was tweeted to the Columbus Police Department’s twitter page.

A Columbus lady spotted a dog in a hot car, called 911, but an officer never showed.

That led her to tweet at CPD to let them know.

Within thirty minutes, she got a response and they worked to fix their mistake.

This is one example of how social media accounts pay off for police and residents.

One unexpected 911 response, leads to another unexpected Twitter response for this resident.

“I thought, well, social media can help, so let’s go that route and it did the trick. It went right to the person it needed to go to and who needed to see it and the city saw that a change needed to be made,” says resident  Kay Quinlan.

When Kay Quinlan first started typing out the 140 character complaint, she never expected an answer.

“I just thought, you know, maybe they’ll see the tweet and just kind of say, ‘oh, you know, just another citizen complaining,’ so I did not, did not think this would happen.”

CPD’s twitter page came to life because they wanted to have a fast and effective way for the community to reach them.

“We encourage people to point things out to us, to ask questions, you know, if you’ve got an emergency we still want you to call 911 because it’s not meant for that,” says Columbus Public Information Officer Joe Dillon.

Dillon says this isn’t the first case where CPD’s twitter has come in handy and they don’t want it to be the last.

“You saw a police officer stop and help a person with a flat tire and so anything that’s positive we want it. Of course, we’ve got to have the negative, but if it’s something we need to respond or you don’t feel like you’re getting the proper attention, then do tweet,” says Columbus Police Assistant Chief Fred Shelton.

Quinlan says it’s a great way to keep citizens informed.

“A lot of times, we don’t know where to start when we need to contact someone, or we don’t know who the person in charge is and not everybody needs to call the mayor, not everybody needs to call the police chiefs,” says Quinlan.

The new policy change went into effect yesterday.

The policy change now requires an animal control officer and a police officer to respond to animals locked in vehicles, rather than just an animal control officer.