The mountain lion episode of May 17th illustrates the advantage of being able to use e-mail as part of a package of tools for communicating with residents of Palo Alto. Many people in the area around the sightings said that their first information came from an e-mail from Karen White, or from someone who had received the e-mail.

Many of the neighborhood associations maintain e-mail lists that could quickly provide an immediate base for such a capability.

Below are some topics and issues that we suspect are likely to come up in the meeting in case you haven't thought of them already.

Anticipated topics and issues

Mechanism

For emergencies, e-mail from specified addresses at the PAPD could be automatically forwarded to neighborhood lists (either all or just selected ones, depending upon the circumstances).

For other notifications, messages could go to an address on those lists. Each list manager could determine whether those messages would be automatically forwarded, or pass through the normal moderation process.

Political Issues

• Emphasis that e-mail is just one of the pathways for notifying people
  • Acknowledge that everyone does not have e-mail
  • Acknowledge that many that do have e-mail, do not check it regularly
  • However, it does provide quick distribution to a broad fraction of the community and in a form that can be easily and accurately relayed (contrast to relaying telephone messages).
• The neighborhood associations lists do not, and cannot, cover all residents.
  • Some residents live in areas not covered by an association or covered by an association that doesn't maintain an e-mail explorer.
  • Some residents do not want to have to belong to their neighborhood association in order to receive these alerts.
  • Neighborhood lists simply provide a bootstrap, not the end-point.

Potential use of the notification scheme

This mechanism needs to be used for more than just emergency notifications. Things used only in emergencies tend to be forgotten or misused, or have atrophied to the point of no longer functioning. The mechanical analogue to training of people for such events.

Example: the telephone alert system was not activated during the mountain lion episode.

Potential uses:

• Time-critical notifications such as the one for the mountain lion, and the follow-up message that the danger was over (the lion had been shot).

  Older example: in the late 1990s, a woman was attacked on the bike path in Bol Park by a man with a hammer. The couple that ran to her aid first called the police and then sent an e-mail to the neighborhood list. The City's automated call system wasn't activated until the next morning and took 2 days to complete the cycle (it has since been upgraded but ...).



• Timely notification of new crime trends, such as theft from mailboxes, solicitor fraud, ...

  Currently, the useful information about this comes from individual residents (often victims or someone close to them) based upon incomplete information from the responding officer.



• Requests for vigilance for specific events.

  For example, about a year ago, master keys for several PAUSD schools were stolen and it was going to be at least a day before all the locks could be re-keyed. A request for residents to be especially watchful for suspicious events around schools was distributed to all the managers of the e-mail lists for the neighborhood associations in PAN (Palo Alto Neighborhoods) and redistributed to their lists.



• Requests for information about specific crimes. Currently, police officers knock on doors of nearby residents asking for information and leave business cards when no one is home. E-mail can supplement this effort, covering a wider area with minimal increase in effort.

  For example, after a suspected burglary attempt in Barron Park, one reply to the e-mail announcement reported the license number of a car that had been seen speeding away at almost the exact time and only a few blocks away (resolution unknown).