By William Kaempffer, Register Staff

NEW HAVEN — Seeclickfix, a Web site where people can report anything from potholes to neighbors with squalid yards, has developed a steady following in its nine months of existence.

Now add the New Haven Police Department to the fold.

Ben Berkowitz, one of the creators of the site, recently made a presentation before department brass and set up watch areas for each of the department’s 10 district managers.

What does that mean? If motorists consistently run the stop sign in front of your house, you can flag the problem on the Web site, and the police supervisor in charge of your area will receive an e-mail on his or her Blackberry.

“It’s just another method to get information from the public and get information directly back to them,” said Chief James Lewis, who invited Berkowitz to a staff meeting at police headquarters this month. “There’s no cost. It plays well to us issuing out the Blackberrys. It does connect nicely with that.”

The Web site has developed an expanding user base around Greater New Haven and has been discovered by users, to a lesser degree, around the country. The concept is as the name suggests: See a problem, click on the computer, hopefully get it fixed.

The fix aspect is where the watch areas come in. Since the site launched, Berkowitz has met with officials from Public Works, Transportation, Traffic and Parking and the Engineering departments, among others, and set up watch areas for them. Certain key words in the text of the complaint trigger an e-mail to the appropriate location.

“We didn’t envision non-emergency crime being on Seeclickfix, but certainly it fits the model,” Berkowitz said.

People who need immediate attention from police should still call 911 or the non-emergency line at 946-6316.

At this point, the site doesn’t calculate statistics that would quantify response time for a problem being addressed, Berkowitz said, but “it’s something we are looking at doing in the future.” Continued...

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It’s too early to say how effective the program will be with police, he acknowledged, since the watch areas were just recently set up and some of the district managers are still getting oriented with the system.

“I get a lot of e-mail forwarded from that Web site on a variety of issues” and forward police-related ones to the appropriate person, Lewis said.

“Someone set up an account for me. Certainly some of them are of value, people telling us about traffic issues.”

Others don’t fall under the police purview.

The city is divided into 10 districts, similar to precincts, and a lieutenant is assigned to supervise each.

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