Courtesy Photo/South Portland Police Department

SOUTH PORTLAND —The South Portland Police Department has launched its Citizen Service Program. 

The new program is a records management system that allows the public to have access and request various types of information from the police department. It is shared between the South Portland, Cape Elizabeth and Portland police departments and is a way to improve their services to the communities.  

The website allows residents to create an anonymous tip, have access to the police departments monthly newsletter, file a complaint, view road closures, such as construction, block parties, get an incident report for non-emergency cases, crime statistics to better understand the trends, and view a crime map to get a better understanding for crime patterns in the area. It also allows users to see police alerts to help get the word out.

“It specifically isn’t a new website,” said Officer David Stailing of the Community Response Department at the South Portland Police Department. “I guess it is a new records management system that the city of South Portland Police Department is using and within this system it has a module that can connect with the public so the public can have access to certain things from our system through a special portal and can request information. We can share information from this portal as well,” 

There will be limited space when filling out an online police report, said Stailing. Online reports should be a crime with an unknown suspect, for example identify theft, a burglary when residents were not home and lost property. The online report system will ask if the crime happened in South Portland. Did an injury occur because of this crime or incident? The questions will vary depending on how they are answered. If more information is needed, police will reach out through the portal. 

“It is helpful for the community to reach out to us,” said Stailing. “If there is somebody that cannot drive down to the police department because they do not have a car or when COVID first started, we were referring a lot of people to this online reporting because we could not meet in person so we would sometimes talk with them on the phone and kind of get the information out in the air and refer them to this program.

“It is helpful if people can’t drive and it is a form of communication. Everything is done by phone or computer these days and I think that this is just another step that everyone is taking,” 

After several months of research and trying to find the best company to partner with, the police department chose to work with ProPhoenix Corporation which has partnered with its current vendor, Public Safety Software. 

“The people that this is from is ProPhoenix,” Stailing said. “It is a company that is not in the state of Maine, and we are the first police department in the state of Maine to use this management system from ProPhoenix. (There have been) bumps in the road (because) this is the first police department to use it, so we have to kind of form it to the needs of the state of Maine with laws, all our reporting statistics that we need, national stats that are required from us and running people’s driver’s licenses … it needs to be fine-tuned to the state of Maine Bureau of Motor Vehicles. It has taken a little bit of time, like with any new system it takes a good year to get all the bugs worked out.” 

It is a “work in progress” Stailing said, with more features to be rolled out in the near future. 

For more information, visit the South Portland Police Department web page.