CRANBERRY TWP — As sheriffs in the Old West deputized citizens, so, too, has Cranberry Township.

“I always tell Kevin (Meyer, chief of police) that we have 32,000 police officers,” Jerry Andree, township manager, told residents Thursday night. “That's all of you.”

Andree said they have an important duty: to inform police when something is suspicious.

That was the theme of Thursday night's installment, titled “See Something, Say Something,” of the township's Coffee and Conversation program. The event featured Meyer, Butler County Emergency Services Director Steve Bicehouse and Bob Winters, a protective security adviser for the Department of Homeland Security's Pittsburgh district. Winters addressed upfront something he said is important.

“People are not suspicious,” he said. “Just because a person is of a certain race, certain color, certain creed, certain religion, that does not make them suspicious, whether they're in your community, not regularly in your community, whatever.”

But just because a person cannot inherently be suspicious, Winters said, their actions can be if they appear to be out of place.

“If a person is taking a video of a wedding that's going on at your church, (that's a) completely normal situation,” Winters said. “Now, conversely, if someone is sitting outside your church who's taking video of people coming in and out and not participating in that service, that, in itself, although a normal kind of activity, would be suspicious because of what it is.”

He encouraged people not to be bystanders but to call 911 if something seems suspicious. He shared a story from Beaver County about a person in a movie theater wearing a trench coat who later was found with weapons, rope and duct tape after an off-duty police officer was asked to “check out this guy.”

“The whole time he was in there, improperly dressed, acting weird, not doing things normal, nobody at the theater made a call,” he said. “It's that level of reluctance that we have of talking to strangers that I think we need to overcome when we see those things that are out there.”

Bicehouse said the definition of an emergency is something that's subjective, so calling in an apparently nonemergent situation may, in fact, be an emergency.

“What's an emergency to you?” he asked two different people. “They may not be the same things. We're trained to try to vet that and try to figure out where we need to send that information.”

Winters said Cranberry is an important place to notice things that are out of place. Though it isn't a heavy-crime area, there are many reasons why something that looks suspicious may be nefarious.

“You're at the intersection of two major interstates, and that increases the flow, whether it's drug traffic, whether it be bad guys, good guys, you're just going to get the traffic that comes through,” he said.

“The other thing that's also interesting, of course, is you're a corporate headquarters of the nuclear leader of the world when it comes to technology, so there may be a lot of people interested in getting that kind of information.”

He added there are fusion centers that combine information from law enforcement agencies to see if there are patterns to the reports.

Turning back to his church videotaping analogy, he said reports from Cranberry, Butler and Wexford would find their way to a fusion center. “These are the things when they're reported that somebody at a fusion center is putting together to say, 'You know what, this may be ... a precursor to an attack, but we can do some further investigations,' ” Winters added.

Ways to report suspicious activity besides calling 911, Winters said, are to call the state police's suspicious activity hotline at 888-292-1919, or use the See Something Send Something mobile application, which can include photos.