Baldwin County Sheriff's Office launches app for smartphones
Have a question for the Baldwin County Sheriff's Office? There's an app for that.
In an effort to better serve county residents, the Baldwin County Sheriff's Office has announced a free smartphone app for Android phones.
"The primary motivator was for people to have accessibility, to be able to send us information immediately — on the road, shopping, at the beach, we just want citizens to have that direct accessibility to the Sheriff's Office," said Baldwin County Sheriff Huey "Hoss" Mack.
The "Contact Us" portion of the organization's website has seen increased usage in recent years, Mack said, with information being provided from users on issues from suspected suspicious activity to specific and more general information and questions.
With smartphone usage more prevalent than ever, the move to offer more options for residents' concerns was natural.
"I think this will be another avenue to answer a lot of these questions, just making this way to communicate with us available," Mack said.
Information that is received through the app will be filtered through two different areas.
"One comes into our dispatch center and the other goes into an administrative review," Mack said. "If it is an emergency, we urge you to do that via the telephone side, not the texting side. If it is strictly an inquiry or general information, it will come into our administrative department and may be subject to a one- to two-day waiting period for us to get to it."
Apple iPhone users won't be left in the cold for long, if Mack has his way.
"We have applied for our app approval through Apple, we are just currently waiting for it to be approved," Mack said. "We've been told two to three months, but the Android app did come out relatively quickly."
"We didn't want to wait to, we wanted to roll this first part out as it was available to us," Mack said.
