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An Old Idea Makes a New Neighborhood Safe
01/20/10 - 06:03 PM
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One South Walton neighborhood is taking an old fashioned idea to help keep their homes safe from criminals.

Driftwood Estates in Santa Rosa Beach is just beginning neighborhood watch program. One resident says that nosy neighbors really do keep the criminals away.

Look out of the back windows of Monique Murray’s home at Santa Rosa Beach and you’ll see a newly constructed park. The park is meant to serve the residents of Driftwood Estates. But Murray says it raises safety concerns:  “…the people that worked on that park really worked hard, and I want it to stay a good place.”

Murray says that it’s a dawn to dusk park, but that she’s seen kids hanging around after dark. She wants to protect her home and family. That’s why she decided to start neighborhood watch program “…I can see the lights and I can see kids going in and out of the bathrooms after dark and…what are they doing?”

Murray believes it’s important for neighbors to look out for each other and in their case, keep the park from becoming a breeding ground for illicit activity. She says so far the program is going well. Murray is the liaison, but the sheriff’s office set up a system to report anything out of the ordinary “…she set us up with what’s called a phone tree. I’m at the top of that phone tree and there’s a bunch of really great people who are going to help both on this side of the neighborhood and on the complete opposite side of the neighborhood so that we can kind of call each other.”

Any neighborhood can start up a watch program. Anna LaCour with the sheriff’s office says the citizens decide how it will work for them “…the structure, how strict they want it is all up to the individuals…how they want to operate it. They’re not ‘ordered’ by the sheriff’s department to have a meeting once a week, once a month, once a quarter; it’s all up to them.”

Murray says “it’s mostly watching. That’s all we’re really supposed to do. We’re not supposed to be vigilantes. We’re just supposed to kind of keep an eye on what’s going on and then report it to the sheriff’s office so they can come out and do their job.”

If you are interested in starting a watch program in your neighborhood just contact the Walton County Sheriff’s Office at .