LINCOLN — The Lincoln Police Department, which last year received an award for community policing at the International Association of Chiefs of Police convention in Chicago, is on its way to implementing a state-of-the-art public alert system that will issue urgent messages to Lincoln residents' mobile messaging devices.

Lincoln Police Chief Ted Smith said in a recent interview the new system would deliver alerts directly to residents and would reach them faster than the present automated “reverse calling” system. That system is limited to land-line phones, or to residents who have provided police with cellular telephone numbers, he said.

“This should be much more effective. I think most people now use one kind of mobile communication device or another,” Smith said.

The system, called Ping4, will deliver emergency alerts via an application on receivers' devices.

“After reviewing our data, it was discovered that fewer people are maintaining land-line phones and few are signing up their cell phones. We were also missing a large segment of our population, the seasonal owners, weekly renters and the tens of thousands of visitors to the White Mountains,” the chief said in a news release.

But the town won't eliminate its reverse calling system, he said.

“A number of options were researched and it was decided to utilize Ping4 for our main emergency outreach system and our reverse calling system as a secondary system,” he said.

Smith said the deciding factor for him was that Ping4 has a free app for android phones and iPhones. Individuals can download it wherever they live and, “once they are in our geographic region they will receive our messages.” Other New Hampshire agencies have also switched to Ping4, including Manchester, Concord, Nashua and Hampton Beach, he said.

The new system will send color-coded messages based on the importance of the content, with red the highest level.

Green, for example, will be used basic information dealing with traffic, certain crime information, and other public safety messages.

“This system would have been instrumental in searching for the elderly woman who wandered away from her house the evening of Thanksgiving and caused a massive search in this area,” the chief said.

“Our current system notified residents and gave a verbal description. With Ping4 we can send a picture of the subject. This would have saved countless hours of chasing down leads that helpful people contacted us with,” he said.

The Ping4 application is available for downloading at a number of locations, including the Lincoln Police Department website.

“At noon each day the town siren goes off, a reminder of the mill days of Lincoln's past and our first early warning system. Today, the Lincoln police use the best technology in our society to perform this same function, to keep people safe in an emergency,” Smith said in the release.

bhookway@newstote.com