Hanahan Police Department launches new at-risk resident database

HANAHAN, S.C. (WCBD) – The Hanahan Police Department launched a new program Thursday, which provides officers information about at-risk residents.

Hanahan At-Risk Residents Table (HART) provides a way for the police department to keep the community safe. As officials cite over 20% of children are affected by neurodiversity and seven million adults live with Alzheimer’s or dementia in the United States. Those numbers boiled down to the city equals over 8,000 residents who may live with these effects.

“What implemented this was just recently we had an individual at a residence, who was elderly, suffering from some sort of medical condition that wandered away from his residence twice in a day. So, that was kind of the catalyst to push this out as fast as we could,” Rick Gebhardt, police chief of Hanahan, said.

The entries are uploaded on a platform that only law enforcement can access. Friends and family can upload information and photos of their loved ones at any time.

“This is a way for citizens to enter information on loved ones from their name, their address, their date of birth, physical descriptors, locations they like to frequent, medications, and medical history,” Gebhardt said. “So, we can better respond to them and provide them with assistance.”

Though, the department has been looking to get a database like this off the ground for a couple months. In the case of a missing person, officers can now respond quickly and efficiently.

“We’ve been trying to get something like this implemented for a while – just with the ‘Just Bee’ training that we had a few months ago from the Just Bee Corporation. We just saw the need to have the database where families can enter this information that we can have access to at the tip of our fingers at any call, to help share the information in a more efficient manner,” Gebhardt said.

Hanahan Police said you may contact them by phone or by email on the city’s website.