City of Las Cruces and associated departments will discontinue X (Twitter) pages October 15th

LAS CRUCES, New Mexico (KVIA) -- The City of Las Cruces, and its associated departments, including the Las Cruces Police Department, will shut down their X (formerly known as Twitter) platforms in mid-October.

A post on the city's X page from September, 26th reads:

"The official X (Twitter) account for the City of Las Cruces will be discontinued effective Oct. 15, 2023, due to limited engagement. Kindly follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok @lascrucesgov to stay informed about our latest updates and events."

A similar post on the Las Cruces Police Department's X page reads: "The official X (Twitter) account for the Las Cruces Police Department will be discontinued effective Oct. 15, 2023, due to limited engagement. Kindly follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok to stay informed about Las Cruces Police."

ABC-7 spoke with the city's director of communications, Mandy Leatherwood Guss, about the pages' shutdowns Monday.

"We were looking at [our] engagement with X, and we saw that people are just not using it as a platform in Las Cruces," she said.

"A specific post we had last month we did about the police telling folks to lock their cars, hide their belongings, take their keys with them, got 12,000 engagements on Facebook, and just over 600 on X," said Leatherwood Guss.

"When we're looking at where we put our resources, it just doesn't make sense anymore," she added.

Leatherwood Guss added that Elon Musk's purchase of the platform back in 2022 didn't factor in to the city's decision to shut down their pages.

"It really was just a matter of how the platform was working for us, for the city," said Leatherwood Guss.