As students on campus are spending more time on their phones and computers, the Ames Police Department and ISU Police Department are starting to put an emphasis on their social media presence in an effort to keep students informed.

“I think the biggest thing is that two-way conversation we can have with people,” said Jason Tuttle, investigations commander and public information officer with Ames Police. “It’s a way for us to interact with them; it’s a way for them to interact with us.”

Since it is a two-way conversation, the public can often help identify subjects.

“We posted a picture of a guy that was involved in a credit card fraud case,” Tuttle said. “Within about 20 minutes someone messaged me the name of the suspect.”

ISU Police is also heavily involved with social media.

Community Outreach Officer Anthony Greiter runs the ISU Police social media pages.

“One of the ways we ask for feedback is for people to help us identify suspects,” Greiter said.

Greiter continued, saying that social media plays a vital role in modern police work.

“We’ve had multiple cases where we have put photos up of people we weren’t able to identify through our initial investigation. Those photos have gone up, they’ve gotten an immense response from our community and we’ve been able to identify suspects [and] witnesses and gathered a lot of information just by asking our community for some help,” he said.

The ISU Police Department social media pages have developed a large following because of some of its posts as well as its kind-hearted rivalry with the University of Iowa Police Department.

“We need people to understand that cops are real humans,” Greiter said. “We’re not robots, we like to have a good time. We like to be entertaining. We like to be entertained.”

Greiter said the posts that show officers are humans have helped garner ISU Police’s large following.

“A lot of students and a lot of our community follow people on social media or businesses on social media for entertainment purposes,” Greiter said. “If I’m only putting out seatbelt safety regulations or laws or legal updates or asking for the community to do stuff for us, am I going to be engaging? I don’t think so.”

In the week of the Cy-Hawk football game, many people were talking about the rivalry on the field, but students around campus were also being entertained by the social media war between ISU Police and University of Iowa Police.

Noah Garwood, freshman in pre-industrial design, has noticed the different departments’ social media presences.

“I like the way they try to connect to college kids by being funny and having rivalries between different police stations,” Garwood said. “They are really funny and entertaining, so kids like to follow them and when kids follow them, they get the important information they need.”