Portsmouth police offering secure alerts via text messages

City residents – and anyone else who’s interested – can sign up for a new, free public-safety alert system that can warn them about neighborhood gas leaks, remind them about road closings or enlist their help in finding missing children.

The notices can come to them as text messages on their cell phones or Twitter accounts, referring them to a Web site for more information, including photos and maps. The full message plus a link to the site can be sent to e-mail accounts.

And most importantly to the Portsmouth Police Department, subscribers can reasonably trust that the messages aren’t bogus. The department this spring  began using a more-secure portal to send them out: Nixle,  designed specifically for municipalities and community organizations seeking tamper-proof systems for official notifications.

“This doesn’t eliminate it, but it makes it harder to do,” said officer Scott White,  who works on the technology needs of the department.

The Nixle system replaces a similar alert system begun in October  that used e-mail and only attracted about 90  subscribers citywide, White said.

Recent local messages announced the arrest of a murder suspect and weekend events that would affect traffic. “It’s to open the lines of communication,” White said. “Whatever we can do to get information to the people we serve.”

For more urgent situations, such as hurricane evacuations or hazardous-materials spills, the city is updating its reverse-911 system – where residents are called with prerecorded messages – to a Web-based system with larger capacity that can inform the entire city within 30  minutes, said Battalion Chief Jeff Terwilliger. The police’s Nixle system, while it also can issue public-safety warnings, is oriented more toward general information, White said.

White and a handful of others are authorized to post messages.

Nixle came about because miscreants posted phony Twitter messages in places such as Austin, Texas, and on behalf of then-candidate Barack Obama’s  presidential campaign, said Craig Mitnick,  Nixle’s chief executive officer, from outside Philadelphia. “Most of these social networking platforms are not built for official information, and when you do use them for that, you have problems,” Mitnick said.

More than 800  cities and towns in 43  states are using or testing the program since February,  according to Mitnick and Nixle’s Web site, including Virginia Beach, Norfolk and 15  of the nation’s 50 largest cities. There’s no cost to governments or subscribers, Mitnick said.

White said he can tailor alerts to subscribers within a certain distance from an incident, such as a gas leak. Subscribers can specify what types of information they want to receive, and how, and can change their preferences.

To sign up, go to www. nixle.com.

Matthew Bowers, (757) 222-3893, matthew.bowers@pilotonline.com