Massachusetts officials locate missing elderly man within 15 minutes using CodeRED notification system

Officials with the Plymouth County Sheriff’s Department and Taunton Police Department in Massachusetts attribute their ability to quickly locate a missing elderly man on October 16, 2014 with their use of the CodeRED emergency notification system. According to the Plymouth County Sheriff’s Department, the Taunton Police Department called in to report a missing 76-year-old man suffering from dementia who went missing. They requested use of the CodeRED system to help locate the man who was last seen headed toward the city.

Plymouth County mapped a specific geographic area to reach approximately 33,000 residents within a 5-mile radius of where the man was last seen. Using an integrated message approach, residents in the area received telephone calls to their landlines and cell phones, emails and push notifications through the CodeRED Mobile Alert app. Plymouth County’s advanced mobile strategy through CodeRED allowed them to reach more than 130 residents through the CodeRED Mobile Alert app based on the GPS of their smartphones. The app allows Plymouth and Bristol counties to reach residents and visitors on their smartphone and tablet devices within a specific geographic area based on the person’s current location.

Within 15 minutes of the messages being delivered, a person who had received the CodeRED call said a person matching the missing elderly man’s description wandered to his doorstep. He contacted Taunton Police, who immediately responded and reunited the man safely with his family.

“It’s a really big deal to us that we can use our tools like CodeRED to help find people. If we didn’t have a system like this it may have taken hours for him to be found,” said Nicole Callahan, Deputy Director of the Plymouth County Sheriff’s Department. “I take that as a complete success and that’s exactly how the system is supposed to work,” she added.

The Plymouth County Sheriff’s Department provides all law enforcement agencies within Plymouth and Bristol counties access to the CodeRED system to deliver emergency messages. The CodeRED system is provided by Emergency Communications Network, currently serving more than 170 communities in Massachusetts, among thousands of other communities across the United States and Canada.