Crime alert notification assurance

Clarence Schadegg wants to know when a crime alert is issued for his Richfield neighborhood.

Because he is blind, it has not always been easy to learn of alerts.

“Any of us with a disability need to be informed when these incidents happen,” he told the House Crime Victims/Criminal Records Division Jan. 30. “The best way for us to be informed is to receive a crime alert formatted as a Word document.”

The problem, Schadegg said, is that the e-mail notification often comes as a PDF file attachment, something that is not compatible with all reader software.

“If a PDF is sent out as the only formatted document of a crime alert, then it singles us out as people who cannot read, and therefore we’re not informed,” he said. Schadegg has gotten the Richfield Police Department to send its alerts with both a PDF and Word file attached.

Sponsored by Rep. Paul Thissen (DFL-Mpls), HF254 states, “If a law enforcement agency provides a crime alert to citizens within its jurisdiction, the alerts and any accompanying documents must be in a form that a disabled person can access with commercially available text-based screen reader software.”

It received division approval and was sent to the House Public Safety Policy and Oversight Committee.

Its companion, SF265, sponsored by Sen. Ken Kelash (DFL-Mpls), awaits action by the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The bill would also classify as private the names and contact information of citizens requesting a crime alert.

Rep. Paul Kohls (R-Victoria) said he is “sympathetic” to the reasoning behind the bill, but is concerned about issuing a local government mandate without accompanying dollars. “Cities that are currently doing crime alerts may elect not to do them if the costs are going to increase for doing it. They may just say ‘We’re not going to do this,’ and then don’t we have a whole group of people who are getting information now that is useful to them not getting it?”