Police in Lawrence, Kansas Using Funny Social Media Posts To Ensure 4/20 Safety

With the wild and crazy marijuana holiday coming tomorrow, police around the nation are on guard for drugged drivers on the road. Police departmens around the country have different ways of warning their communities about being cautious on April 20th, but the police in Lawrence, Kansas have turned to lighthearted, humorous but also serious tweets to their community.

The marijuana legalization movement has not come to Kansas yet as they are one of only two states that have absolutely no medical marijuana program whatsoever. However, their is plenty of advocacy for marijuana in the state that is currently staying on its side of the rainbow. Modern technology and the normalization of marijuana consumption is plainly evident in the Lawrence Police Departments’ approach to protecting people tomorrow.

“Being in a university town, we have a really high population of people age 18 to 25, and so I really saw Twitter as an opportunity to reach those people,” Fennelly says. “And that was a demographic that we were kind of missing as a police department prior to that.”

“I feel like their familiarity with what we’re putting out on Twitter makes them feel a personal connection to an officer that they come across in the community … they can go up to an officer and say ‘Hey, just want to say — love your Twitter account, think it’s great,’ ” Fennelly says. “For officers to be able to have that interaction, I think that’s the best thing that we can hope for in our community policing efforts.”

The Lawrence Police Department’s Twitter account now has more than 100,000 followers — more people than the most recent census estimate for the city it serves.

After a long legislative session in 2017, Kansas Lawmakers could not put together a medical marijuana program for their residents. Do you think that state lawmakers will get it done in 2018?

read more at npr.org

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