National Night Out Helps Maple Grove Police Connect with Community

Maple Grove kicked off National Night Out celebrations on Tuesday, Aug. 4 with a cookout at Central Park.

“We have information booths, but more importantly we’re here to feed the community,” said Maple Grove Police Chief Eric Werner. “By cooking hot dogs, bratwurst, we start our engagement with them. And that kicks it off for the rest of tonight’s events.”

It’s part of an effort to foster new community relationships.

 Those relationships can help prevent future crimes from occurring, according to Werner.

“National Night Out is really just about how we get out and connect with the community,” he said. “So today we have over 180 parties we’re going to visit tonight, in addition to about 1,500 people we’re going to connect with today.”

Meanwhile, Maple Grove police are promoting a new community notification system called Everbridge.

“We’re going out into the community and we’re asking them to sign up for this opt-in system,” Werner said. “What would happen is, if there’s some kind of weather event or public safety event for police or fire, we can blast a message out to the whole community or we can isolate it to a specific portion of the community, and we can tell them exactly what we want. It may be informational or we can give them specific instructions on what to do.”

Maple Grove

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