MOULTRIE – The Colquitt County Sheriff’s Office, which is spearheading a county-wide Neighborhood Watch initiative, held an informational meeting at the sheriff’s office Sept. 5.

There were around 20 residents who attended the meeting where Sheriff Rod Howell and Lt. Sean Ladson, former Moultrie police chief, addressed the audience.

Howell said that he had made ten goals when he became sheriff and was working on them, especially since Ladson had just recently returned to the sheriff’s office. He said that he told Ladson that there were some things that he wanted to address and the security and safety of the community was one of them.

“He’s taken it and run with it. We’ve already met with one Neighborhood Watch group. It’s small but it’s going to grow,” he said.

Howell showed the residents a map of the county and told them that he was going to tell them about what his sheriff’s deputies do.

“We are a 557-square-mile county. We also encompass the City of Moultrie in that 557 square miles,” he said.

The sheriff’s office breaks the county up into four zones and has five deputies on a shift, one assigned to each zone with a supervisor running the middle.

“Since we’ve implemented this, we average about 12- to 13-minute response time. But, let me tell you what 12 to 13 minutes feels like when you need the police. Three days, eight hours and 27 minutes later is what it feels like,” he said.

He said they’re always working to get better and after eight years, they’ve gotten it to 12 minutes on the button.

“But we need you,” he said.

He recounted that he personally had a four-wheeler stolen and two burglaries at his house and, during one of them, his aunt watched the thieves come down the lane and didn’t call anybody.

“Be a nosy neighbor. It’s okay. If people get mad because you’re nosy, they’ll get over it. But when they’re toting my stuff out, I really wish you’d be nosy,” Howell said.

Howell also said, “I know every neighbor within 10 miles of me. We don’t do that anymore. Go find out who your neighbors are.”

He said if they were living next to their neighbor of 30 years and see a U-Haul truck pull up to their house, in the middle of the afternoon, when the neighbor is supposed to be out of town, then call and ask them about it.

“You think it’s odd but we’ve had U-Haul trucks pull-up and burglarize houses and nobody said, ‘What is the U-Haul truck doing there?’ They didn’t think anything about it. Pick up the phone and call somebody,” he said.

He told them to be seen watching what goes on in their neighborhood and if a car goes by that they don’t know, stare at it. He added that people get uncomfortable when they think that they’re going to get caught.

Howell said that some of the things the sheriff’s office was also doing was using a Flock camera system. These cameras employ license plate recognition technology.

“That camera takes a picture of every car and every tag that drives by it,” he said.

He said that he and Ladson had gotten the University of Georgia to do a crime analysis study on Colquitt County and they had identified the higher crime areas, which were out in the county.

“So the first Flock cameras that I put up are in that area. Within 24 hours, we recovered a stolen truck,” he said.

He explained that the system alerts deputies in their cars when a stolen vehicle is spotted by the camera and they can go to the area to check it out. He also told the audience that he had five Flock cameras and the commission had approved 20 more, which he will get next year.

Right now, when a 911 call comes in, the operator keys in the information before they tell the officer where to go, which might take two minutes, Howell said. Then, by the time they tell them, it’s four minutes gone and then by the time the officer gets there, it’s 11 minutes.

“So those devices will help us, in my opinion, get there way faster,” he added.

Howell said that the sheriff’s office would do everything it could to help residents establish their Neighborhood Watch and there was literature and signs that they could give them for their programs.

Ladson handed out a sign-up sheet so the residents could put down their contact information and what area they lived in and added, “If you put your name on there, expect me to follow-up with you.”

He said, in his experience, Neighborhood Watch is usually reactive. He said a community within the county or city would have cars broken into and he would get a call about it or Facebook posts.

“Then, somebody would come to me and say, ‘Can we do a Neighborhood Watch?’ And we would try to throw something together that would last for about two or three weeks. Everything would calm down and we’d catch the bad guys and then wouldn’t hear anything else,” Ladson said.

He said it was kind of an uphill battle and residents being at the meeting said that they wanted to be proactive and wanted to do something.

“That’s why I want the list. If we have four across the county and city, I’ll be ecstatic. Four, solid groups, even if they have to stretch one-half of the city, one-half of the county. Whatever we need to do to make this happen is what we need to do,” he said.

He said that there were three goals, in his opinion, the first being to suppress crime.

“The second one is let’s make our neighborhood and our community safe and secure and then the third goal is let’s strengthen the bonds between the sheriff’s office,” Ladson said.

He said if they send a message to the criminals, as a community, by having a Neighborhood Watch, it will make it harder for them to commit the crimes.

“My goal is to contact everybody here who wants to start a Neighborhood Watch program,” he said and introduced Roberta Sealy, who he said leads a very robust Neighborhood Watch program.

He said the sheriff’s office was hoping to use her program as a flagship that some of the other programs could anchor to and he could also meet with them.

He said one thing officers do at the meetings is to answer questions about specific things the Neighborhood Watch participants were interested in like how a burglary was handled by an investigator.

“Mrs. Roberta’s group, I’m gonna come back at their next meeting and we’re gonna talk about ‘the use of force’ as far as the state law that applies to citizens,” he said.

He said, for another group, they did a program about the gangs that were in Colquitt County because that was something that they needed to know about.

“So, there’s a lot of stuff we can do to keep people engaged to build that network and to build meetings. … And that’s what we’re trying to do here,” Ladson said.

He went on to say that if either he or Howell needed to go out and talk to the groups to pull the network together, then that’s what they were going to do.

“If you need me to facilitate. Try to find a place to have it. Whatever we can do as partners with you guys, that’s what we’re gonna do,” he said.

Sealy got up and spoke a little bit about her Neighborhood Watch group, which she started in 2013. She showed the audience stickers and a sign with the program’s logo on it that could be put up around neighborhoods that have a program.

She also gave some tips on how to get a program started and maintain it including passing out flyers in the community and planning activities to keep members engaged. She said that they were planning on expanding their Neighborhood Watch into neighboring communities.

“If we can get more people involved with that area, they can help us expand out even further around the county. That’s what our goal is,” Sealy said.

She also encouraged them to get to know their neighbors, exchange phone numbers with them and let them know that they can call if they need help.

“And that’s what it’s going to take. It’s going to take you going out there, face to face, and meeting people and get them to get involved with you,” she said.