In addition to more transparency about where crime occurs in the city of Craig, Craig Police Department’s new CrimeWatch website allows citizens to inform law enforcement if someone with special needs lives in their household before law enforcement enters.

Chief Mike Cochran told Craig city council on Tuesday that officers can then know how to handle that situation beforehand.

“That information is only shared with public safety within the community,” Cochran said. “It gives us a heads up if we’re going to a house that says ‘Hey, in this house, you might have a 911 call, but there’s a deaf person in the house.’ So we’re aware of those things going into them, and that was huge. I think that’s a great attribute of this website.”

Earlier this year CPD launched its CrimeWatch website, which features pages that show where certain crimes occur, short descriptions of incidents as they come in and various registrations that citizens can opt in for. Only law enforcement can access those registrations, meaning the public can’t access where people with special needs live.

“When you do a registration (for a special needs person), what it does is it gives me an email and I get a form of what’s been filled out,” Cochran added. “And our process will be that we’ll take that form to the 911 Center, so that that information is associated with the address you’ve put on that register.”

Citizens can sign up for push notifications from CPD as well. This allows Cochran or other law enforcement leadership to send alerts to subscribers regarding important cases that the public may have information about.

“A couple of weeks ago, we had a missing child. I did a push notification from the house on an app on my cell phone and everybody that subscribed got an email with a picture of this child that was missing,” Cochran said. “We had just recently, in Rio Blanco, a kidnapping. I do that push notification with the picture of the female, and everybody that subscribes gets an alert or an email with that information. It gives us the opportunity even when you’re busy on a crime scene that a very quick push of a couple of buttons, and you send out a notification to everybody.”