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2017 Annual Report • Police Department • St. Anthony Village, Minnesota <br /> <br /> <br />31 | P a g e <br /> <br />Our department offers volunteer opportunities <br />to citizens in our community as well. We <br />have a well-established reserve officer <br />program at SAPD that provides many <br />important functions for the police <br />department. The reserve unit is comprised <br />of all citizen volunteers that support patrol <br />functions by conducting house checks for <br />residents on vacation, business checks, <br />assisting officers with traffic control, event <br />security, pedestrian safety and special events such as Village Fest and high school sports events. <br />Members of our Reserve Officer Unit participate for many reasons and come from all <br />backgrounds. They offer a vital service to our agency and community, and bring interesting <br />perspectives and diversity to our department. All are motivated by a self-less and generous <br />drive to give something back to our community. <br />One of the newer components of our community engagement strategy is to reach out and <br />connect with people in a more immediate and accessible way. To further this, we have begun <br />connecting with citizens over social media platforms. We currently maintain accounts on <br />Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. We encourage, and expect, all of our officers to be involved <br />in this exchange with our citizens through these outlets. We’ve been fortunate that members of <br />our community have embraced this and provided us with <br />extremely valuable feedback. Citizens have made us aware of <br />issues and concerns through these channels and we have been <br />able to direct our activities toward needs the community has <br />identified to get results they desire. Along with that, we’ve <br />benefitted from learning new things and taken suggestions from <br />people who have reached out to us in this way. Our community <br />has a lot of great ideas. The department has also been able to <br />educate citizens on how the agency operates, update the public <br />on the status of cases, display unique police department equipment, request the public’s help in <br />resolving or preventing crimes, and sometimes poke fun at ourselves. In all cases, the essence <br />of these social media communication efforts is to focus on the community itself.