The Macoupin County Sheriff’s Office has released a new mobile app.
The app is available for download on both Android and Apple products.
Macoupin County Sheriff Shawn Kahl says it was released to keep residents of the county informed of any updates and information from the Macoupin County Sheriff’s Office: “One of the main reasons we did this was it gives The Sheriff’s Office a lot more transparency. And, if we have some sort of emergency within our county, it’s going to be a good tool to – I can get on there and I’ve got 5 other employees with access – and we can get on it and send out an emergency notice. It will alert on your phone, so whoever has the app can go on their phone and hit the notification and then, it will show what we’ve got going on. It might be a tornado warning. We might be looking for a missing person and things like that.”
The free download also includes an inmate search function, a jail information section, a sex offender registry, and a place to submit a police tip. Kahl says some of the largest volumes of calls to the Sheriff’s Office is questions about the Macoupin County Jail, and this app will provide a quick way to search for that information or to find out how to get in touch with an inmate.
Kahl says the app was designed by TheSheriffApp. He says the cost to design and set up the app came at no cost to Macoupin County’s taxpayers: “The initial cost was of no cost to the taxpayers of the county. We were able to purchase this through our commissary through the jail. The initial cost was right around $15,000, and the yearly maintenance fee is about $6,000. It’s one of those things where we didn’t have to go through taxpayer money to get it. We used commissary money through the jail.”
Kahl says that the app is easy to navigate for those who aren’t tech savvy. The Macoupin County Sheriff’s app can be found in Apple’s Itunes or on the Google Play store.