Your Policing Priorities and RAVE
First off, I want to invite you to the High Country Rural Crime Watch Association Annual General Meeting to be held on Tuesday, March 12 at 7:00 pm at the Priddis Hall. After a short AGM business meeting, RCMP guests will share an update on what’s happening in the local detachment area. Then there will be a fraud and scams discussion with Q&A throughout. Refreshments will be served.
Note: you do not have to be a member of HCRCWA to attend. If you want to join HCRCWA, we’ll have sign up forms at the meeting. Because we’ve had generous sponsors, presently TC Energy, sign up is free and has been for quite some time.
Secondly, Foothills County, along with our local RCMP detachments, want to hear your thoughts on policing services within the County. You are invited to complete a survey. Please visit: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/FZTN7JL . This is a great opportunity for you to personally tell the RCMP and the County what you would like the policing priorities to be. It’s anonymous.
Now on to the main topic for this month RAVE. There is a relatively new method to receive real-time alerts from the RCMP. It is called RAVE. It is an app you can download and customize to whichever jurisdiction(s) from which you want to receive alerts. The following information is from this rural crime watch website https://www.ruralcrimewatch.ab.ca/resources/rave .
“What is RAVE? RAVE is a web-based communication platform that RCMP officers are mandated to fan out real time alerts to community members in Alberta. Alerts are operational and educational in nature. They might look like BOLOs (Be On the Look Out), Crime Prevention, Victim Services, and District reports. Alerts are sent via email, text message or phone call – preference is on the account user.”
This website gives you instructions on how to sign up. It’s quite straight forward (even I could do it), and if you run into trouble with sign up there is a pop-up buddy that you can use to ask for help. You can amend or opt out of RAVE at any time.
A couple of things to note when you are signing up are: 1) if you use a phone number that uses call blocking or call control, the message will not come through on that line and, 2) when making your selections as to what jurisdictions from which you want to receive alerts, the default setting is for every jurisdiction to be selected in the sign up process, so you will have to unselect those you don’t want otherwise you are going to receive notifications from all 115+ jurisdictions across the province. I wound up with six jurisdictions selected, but you can select any number of jurisdictions that you want. You can change the jurisdictions you’ve selected at any time by logging in and clicking or unclicking on each jurisdiction.
Another feature is that you can add phone numbers to your RAVE account which can be an easy way to include other members of your family or whoever else without them having to create their own account. The whole sign-up/amendment process is quite straight-forward.
Although I don’t use my cell phone very much (poor reception), I did have to use my cell phone as the sign-up phone number as I have call control on my home phone which prevents the voice alerts from coming through. In addition to voice alerts you can also use email and text messaging to receive any alerts. RAVE recommends that you use all three message reception options, but you can choose any or all three message reception options.
Unfortunately, because I have just signed up to RAVE, I cannot give you any guidance on how many alerts you will receive. This will also be contingent upon how many jurisdictions you’ve selected.
On a related note, we need you to be aware that when HCRCWA does a fanout, for those of you who use the phone message option for receiving HCRCWA fanouts, if you have call control set to “on” on your phone, you will not receive fanout messages as the fanout phone message provider has no way of entering the number call control asks for to complete the call. If you have call control set to “off ”, you will receive the fanout message. It should be noted that we are moving away from phone callouts because of the above and the small and declining number of people who have chosen the phone method of receiving fanout messages. We strongly suggest moving to the email method of receiving HCRCWA fanout messages. By far the vast majority of HCRCWA’s 800ish members receive fanouts via the email method.
Dave Schroeder
HCRCWA Board Member
