police departments were to keep you safe on the street and now using a computer in today's home safe home report South Florida police departments tell us how they're using social media to get out their message and hoping you'll share it seems like everyone is clicking liking and posting and everyone using social media includes cops miami-dade police has more than 12,000 followers the Broward Sheriff's Office more than 11,000 Department say they're using social media as a tool to fight crime and to keep you safe at home is it working in coral springs community involvement linn-mar song handle social media outreach and she says it is working in a the most effective way we can communicate with our public within minutes we can get at our crime prevention messages to thousands thousands seeing this post about a missing autistic teen and after tips came in from the public he was located safely we do have more followers on our Facebook page and on average we reach about 4 million people each month the department also pays to promote its posts that's in the budget they also use technology to populate their messages into the news feeds of certain age groups or people in certain zip code just like businesses target their consumers we're able to target our residents and our business owners by age for example older residents were targeted in messages about a recent scam against the elderly and if there are burglaries in a certain neighborhood I'm going to target all of those areas once again another way such a useful tool but they can't monitor that all the time no most Police Department's don't monitor their social media 24-7 so if you really have an emergency you just pick up the phone you gotta call 911