Kingston Police Force is Back Online
As more and more Kingstonians turn to the Internet for information, our online demands of local businesses, government and related service providers are constantly being refined. While the Kingston Police Forces’ website met the standard when it first launched, over the past few years people have begun to notice it’s dated design and severe lack of interactive, up to date content. In 2007, KPF moved from their ageing headquarters at 11 Queen Street to their new LEED-certified home at 705 Division. Since then, Kingston’s keepers of the peace have done nothing to protect us from experiencing their obsolete website. Nearly three years after the move, I am extremely happy to announce that the Kingston Police Force finally has a respectable online presence that will meet our expectations today, and hopefully tomorrow.
The most obvious change to KPF’s website is the look and feel, while the dark blue background and refreshed logo lend each and every page a much needed sense of professionalism. The consistent format, incorporation of select historical photos, clearer navigation as well as the message from Chief Tanner are also noteworthy improvements. While it will be interesting to see if the Chief keeps his personal message up to date, his first acknowledges the re-design and some of the new site’s key features:
Welcome and thank you for visiting our new web site. We hope you will find our new site enjoyable and easy to use. As one of Canada’s oldest municipal police agencies dating back to 1841, we take great pride in our history of serving the Kingston community. Our new website reflects the history of the Kingston Police in many ways and ultimately showcases a modern professional police organization to the city of Kingston and to the world. The new Kingston Police website has structured navigation with quick and easy links to information. We have added several new areas of information for your viewing ease. These include info links for parents, teachers, kids, seniors and local businesses as well as details pertaining to crime prevention and even information on careers in policing. A new feature to our new site is our Crime Reports page. This ability will allow you to view criminal incidents within our community and provides you with our calls for service statistics in a geographical and interactive format. Look for this state of the art, easy to use link under our Crime Prevention page.
Our new website represents a changing police organization, so it goes without saying that our website must also change and grow as well. We hope you enjoy our fresh new look and hope that you take the time to view our new site. Thank you and drop by anytime.
As mentioned by Chief Tanner, the Crime Reports page is a tremendous tool for local citizens who are concerned about crime in a specific neighbourhood. After playing around with the application, I was astonished to see just how many crimes were within a five block radius of our fortress of solitude. I’m going to have to make a concerted effort not to check this map every 5 minutes, but then again KPF clearly states that they can’t guarantee that it will always be up do date. Also, it is worth pointing out that the crime report looks to be based on the same system used by ClickFix, an online application used to identify potholes and other much need road work.
A few additional highlights of KPF’s website include the online criminal background check, resources for seniors (in extra large font of course), information on cyberbullying and cyberstalking, as well as the extremely informative history of the Force. While this round of online renovations is bound to serve the Kingston Police Force for some time, let’s hope they don’t wait over a decade past this site’s due date, before embarking on their next upgrade. Take the website for a spin, and drop off some comments below to let us know what you think.
I'm not going to go too far into it as it probably falls into conflict of interest territory… But with the fair-sized number of web shops in Kingston, you'd think they could have kepth the project local, rather than outsourcing it to a Belleville company.
You know, I didn't even think to look at that, but it's certainly a valid point. Not to suggest that he had anything to do with hiring that firm, but Tanner was the Chief in Belleville before moving to Kingston.
The previous version was so pitiful the new site hardly qualifies as a redesign. It's moreso a complete overhaul, but I agree that it was much needed. I'm going to miss the little Sherlock Holmes icon they had on the site! Otherwise I wouldn't get too caught up in monitoring the crime report. While it is valuable, I just can't see KPS going from zero to this overnight….with everything else they have going on, they can't possibly keep it up to date. ClickFix is a similarly a great example of a useful tool that nobody seems to find time for.
Interesting site and I’m especially interested in the incident report mapping. It’s reasonably well executed, but it’s too bad nobody thought to get the distances in metric.
Hmph. Too bad nobody thought to use metric distances in the incident report map.
Much improved, and actually useful and interesting now. It appears KPF is also cutting edge in Ontario to use the crime report mapping, along with Ottawa.
Yeah I also noticed that Kingston is one of only a few places using this application.
At least the job didn't go to to one of the web-design shops that seem to thrive making circa-1996-style brochureware sites here in Kingston… not naming names of course…