By Emily Rooney
Leicestershire Police were at the DMU campus centre yesterday(MonFEB17) to encourage students to sign up to their Neighbourhood Link service, which aims to inform people about issues facing their communities by keeping the focus of their efforts more local than they can on social media.
Neighbourhood Link “is a way of engaging with your Neighbourhood Policing team” and includes an email messaging service to inform members of the public about “crime reduction and safety advice” in their area.
On the Neighbourhood Link website, the police say “our aim is to keep residents of Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland informed and up to date with news on appeals, events and crime prevention advice as well as information on policing matters that affect you”
To sign up, you must enter your name, email, address, and either a home or mobile phone number.
There are then questions on ethnicity, gender identity, nationality, and which part of Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland you live in, to ensure you get the alerts that are right for you, as different parts of the county, as well as different vulnerable groups, will get different alerts depending on what the priorities are in their community.
Alerts can come via email, voice message or text, and can be from the Police, Action Fraud, the office of the Police and Crime Commissioner, and Neighbourhood Watch.
Most of these service providers will send messages about safety updates, but they all play different roles in the alerts, with, for example, Action Fraud sending advice on how to stay safe from scams and fraud.
There is also an opportunity during sign-up to join the Neighbourhood Watch.
Sign up to Neighbourhood Link at neighbourhoodlink.co.uk
