Hall County authorities have partnered with a neighborhood watch website to increase efforts in county neighborhoods.
The partnership with NextDoor.com is essentially social media for your neighborhood, described Sheriff's Deputy Chad Mann.
"It's like a closed group for Facebook. You can add members, you can delete members, you can pretty much control what happens inside that group and no one else in the Facebook community can see what goes on inside the group," said Mann. "That's what NextDoor does. NextDoor.com invites neighbors to draw out the map around their neighborhood, so they can include streets, neighbors, and the ones who don't want to be in on it can opt out."
Mann said the website allows residents and authorities to post crime bulletins, prevention tips, alerts and other tools to help keep neighborhood residents aware and safe.
"As a partner agency, we're on there and able to post just like we would on Facebook," Mann said. "If we have a specific neighborhood we want to target, we can say 'Hey, look, this is what we're looking for in your entering auto cases,' and we want to post a subject's picture or a suspect's car we've seen in the neighborhood recently, we can target any specific neighborhood and we can send out the message to just that neighborhood."
For help on getting a neighborhood group started, call the Hall County Sheriff's Office at 770-533-7659 or log on to NextDoor.com.
