Albemarle County Police Department and Nextdoor

A forthcoming announcement from Nextdoor & Albemarle County Police:

We are excited to announce that Albemarle County Police Department has shown interest in using Nextdoor to provide important updates and information to neighborhoods in your area. As part of this effort, you may see periodic updates from Albemarle County Police Department staff in your neighborhood. The purpose of these updates is to share alerts, news, and other notifications that are relevant to your neighborhood. It’s important to note that Albemarle County Police Department staff can only see their own posts and replies to these posts. They will NOT be able to access or view any information that you and your neighbors have shared in your neighborhood. Communicating with Albemarle County Police Department staff is entirely voluntary, and you can see more information here. You may choose to unsubscribe from all Albemarle County Police Department posts, as explained here. Please visit our Help Center if you have any questions.

Nextdoor has proven to be quite useful for communicating within the Crozet area; I remain firm in my belief (and practice) that the open internet is a far better space in which to have community conversations, rather than walled off behind closed sites. Not everyone wants to create a Nextdoor or Facebook account, and this is a furthering of the siloing of the internet.

Notes:

1 – Nextdoor is going to be competing with Redfin & Zillow  (as I suspected a couple years ago)

2 – I’ve written about Nextdoor a couple times: in 2014, (and again), and then again in 2014 when discussing helping clients assess the culture/community/friendliness of neighborhoods. (there was an interesting conversation at the time about competing methods of communicating to Crozetians)

3 – I’ll continue sharing important crime alerts on the RealCrozetVA FB page, as that has an extensive reach, but I suspect I’ll be getting some more information from the Nextdoor sites than I do now.