Pleasant Grove police asks community to rate them through text message survey

PLEASANT GROVE, Utah — The Pleasant Grove Police Department has launched a text survey that will be sent to citizens after they’ve had certain interactions with officers.

About four to six hours after a citizen talked with an officer, they’ll get a text message on their phone, asking them to rate their experience.

“If you call 911 or the non-emergency number and your call generates a call for service for law enforcement, you will automatically get a survey between four to six hours after the officers clears your call,” said Capt. Britt Smith.

A five-star rating means someone is highly satisfied with the interaction. One is very unsatisfied. Then, they will have the option to text any additional feedback they have. A third message pops up with an email address they can write to if they want to add more details.

The survey, which launched on Dec. 1, automatically sends after certain types of cases.

“If you call about an animal complaint, traffic accident, your vehicle was broken into, your neighbors are having a loud party, you see a DUI driver,” Smith said. “The types of things we won’t send a survey out on are the crimes against a person — a child abuse, sexual offense, domestic violence. Those types of things would just be inappropriate for us to survey on.”

“We don’t want to make that incident about us; we want to focus on the victim and make sure we’re being sensitive to them,” he added.

The Pleasant Grove Police Dept. is trying something new. After certain interactions with officers, people will receive a text asking them to rate their experience.

The survey comes after calls for law enforcement reform. Watch full story at 5 & 6 @KSL5TV pic.twitter.com/zYj8Wv7PZ4

— Shelby Lofton (@newswithShelby) December 20, 2022

The software recognizes if the feedback is positive or negative. Smith sees the positive messages as they come in.

“We let [officers] see the positive comments that they get back so that they know how they’re doing,” he said.

If there are negative comments, three higher ups within the department get a notification. They can go into the system and investigate what the situation was and who was the officer involved.

“See if there’s something that we could do better to improve so that we can improve ourselves, or if we can go back and fix that incident, and see if we can correct some things that we might have done wrong,” Smith said.

They see it as another tool for accountability. Sgt. Cory Fenton said he thinks the technology will have a big impact on his officers.

“‘I might have done x, y, or z on this particular call, I could probably do better next time,’ I would expect my guys and gals out there to do that,” he said.

They’ve made this program a priority.

“It’s expensive to implement this, but what’s really expensive is having a critical, negative incident in law enforcement. You can’t put a price tag on how bad that can get,” Smith said.

They said their goal is to prevent those incidents by tackling issues immediately.

“2020 and 2021 were really difficult years for law enforcement. There were a lot of really tragic incidents that nationally, law enforcement was involved in,” Smith said. “There was a lot of negative response from the community about law enforcement and there was a lot of requests for law enforcement reform.”

They said they heard the calls for change, and the department wants to respond to those, starting with a text message.