SLO PD increasing use of social media to help find suspects
if you follow the San Luis Obispo Police Department on social media, in between photos of your friends and social savvy pet accounts, you’ll now see the police department uses sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram more than ever to help track down suspects they can’t identify right away.
“Because we have had success with it, we’ve decided to really increase our presence on social media, utilize it more often, to make sure that our folks are getting that information out especially in a timely fashion. So if something happened today, we try and post it that day just to see if we can identify these folks if we’re not able to identify them through any traditional means,” explained Captain Chris Staley of the San Luis Obispo Police Department.
So far they’ve had a pretty good track record.
“Just with the general use of social media and how often people are looking at it, we’ve had people call within an hour of seeing things that we’ve posted on our pages and it’s been super useful,” Captain Staley said.
That’s good news to hear for the owners of the 7-Eleven off California Boulevard; they’re the most recent business to end up on the police department’s pages after a man took merchandise from the store.
“I didn’t recognize him. I was [helping] customers [when] he came back, took a six pack, and he tried to walk out. He saw me and I grabbed a phone and walked out with him and tried to chase him. He ran away to the next building and then I called the police,” said 7-Eleven Manager Kuljinder Singh.
Singh says he thinks that since San Luis Obispo is such a small community, perhaps people’s photos being blasted on social media will dissuade them from committing crimes again.
“If he did this today, absolutely he’s going to do it again. If he sees his pictures or somebody will say “I saw your pictures,” he’s going to say: “Okay I’m getting myself in a bad way.””
The police department would like to remind people that they should still try contacting them through traditional means of 9-1-1 if they are experiencing an emergency.
Click here to like the SLO PD on Facebook.
