Darien Police Department just launched its new website with new features giving the public more information about police activities in town.
The new version of the website also has more links from the home page to information provided on the previous version of the website, making it easier to get to.
What the top of the home page looks like on the new Darien Police Department website.
Crime Reports
One new feature, “Crime Reports,” initially shows a map of recent incidents involving police, including traffic stops and motor vehicle accidents. If you click on a small icon at a particular location, you can get very brief information on the incident.
The nature of an incident can be shown by the icon itself — sometimes an image of a car (for motor vehicle accidents), or letters (“PP” for police stops of motor vehicles; “Q” for some other incidents).
Using the usual minus and plus marks on the map, you can navigate to your neighborhood or see the whole town to look for incidents.
What the Crime Reports page looks like after you click on an icon (here, the Hollow Tree Ridge Road motor vehicle burglary described in this article)
For instance, one incident with a time of 11:15 a.m. on Wednesday is described as “Motor vehicle burglary” occurring on the “100 block” of Hollow Tree Ridge Road (presumably from a car parked at a residence between 100 and 199 Hollow Tree Ridge Road). The incident icon shows the letters “TV,” perhaps meaning “theft from a vehicle.”
(Use the plus or minus signs on the upper right-hand corner of the Google Map to zoom in and out, and move around the map by clicking on a spot with your mouse or touch pad.)
Scroll down further on the home page of the new website, and you see the link to the new “Crime Reports” feature, along with other links.
Other features
Another new feature, an events calendar, is also on the home page, although nearly all the events for December, as of Saturday morning, were for the availability of fingerprinting services (Police Commission meetings were also noted).
The home page also shows feeds from the department’s Facebook and Twitter accounts, showing recent posts to each. Looking at these along with the “News” feed on the home page, together with the “Crime Reports” and (less frequently updated) “News” and “Press Releases” sections can give you a sense of what’s new with the department. Police Commission meeting minutes are also available on the new website, just as they were on the old one.
Here’s what the home page looked like on the old Darien Police Department website, as of Friday morning.
A “How do I …” section of the Home page links to descriptions of various police services, including “Obtain a CT pistol permit?” and “Request traffic enforcement?”
The Police Department hasn’t issued an announcement of the just-launched website or described it to the public yet, so it’s difficult to know whether some features, other than Crime Reports and the events calendar, are new or if they were on the old website but on pages that were less prominent. (Either a department announcement with a detailed account about the website’s new or revised features will come early next week, or Darienite.com will ask for more information and publish it.)
Putting the new website together
On Friday, Darienite.com reported various new Police Department projects involving technology. Here’s what we reported then about the department’s website:
A revamped Police Department website, paid for with money from the false alarm fund, was expected to be launched sometime on Friday, Dec. 18, [Police Chief Duane] Lovello said.
The new website will have a lot more information for the public and be much more user-friendly, he said.
The revamping was financed with more than $11,500 from the false alarm account in July with the approval of the Police Commission. The website has taken longer to build than originally expected. In May, the commission was told that the website was expected to be up and running in two months.
“I think you’re going to be very pleased with what you see,” Lovello told the commission.
Police Sgts. Jeremiah Marron and T.J. Whyte have been building the new website.
Other new town government web services
The Police Department is one of the few town government agencies to operate a website separate from Web pages on the town government website:
- Darien Public Schools this year completely revamped its website.
- The Darien Health Department recently added its full health inspection reports to its Web pages that are part of a site separate from its town government Web pages.
- TV79 now posts previous videos of town board meetings on Vimeo (as far back as January 2015) and more recently added a streaming video service for meetings as they take place.
The town government website itself hasn’t been updated in years, and announcements are frequently buried on lists of links on particular department Web pages.
How to bury an announcement: Darien town government’s website doesn’t show links to new announcements with any prominence. The most recent new link (we think) was to the report of the advisory committee on sidewalks and other pedestrian infrastructure. Trying to find it (that is, if you know it’s there) is like searching for the title character in a “Where’s Waldo?” book illustration. This screen shot shows the screen view near the very bottom of the home page.
Scrolling down on the home page of that website will sometimes give a reader a surprise about an announcement otherwise unpublicized by the town (which has neither a Facebook page nor Twitter account), and the new announcements are unpredictable in timing and need not only scrolling down but a careful perusal of the home page to find.