Crime watch program is the eyes and ears of community

Crime watch program is the eyes and ears of community

BAKER COUNTY, FL - For the past decade the Baker County Sheriff’s Department has had a 25th man on the streets helping fight crime.

Sheriff Joey Dobson created the crime watch program shortly after taking office. Today he credits it with not only keeping crime down, but also helping to promote good neighbors and a 

tight-knit community.

The sheriff also credits the crime watch program with helping keep Baker County’s clearance rate very high. The clearance rate is the percentage of crimes in the county that are cleared or solved.

"We have one of the highest clearance rates in the county," Chief Deputy Gerald Gonzalez said. "I would say that 80 percent of our crimes are solved by citizen participation."

The premise of a crime watch program is to have neighbors keep an eye on each other’s property. If someone suspicious is spotted, the sheriff’s department is informed.

Despite the fact that crime watch gets citizens involved in assisting the sheriff’s department, officials stress that crime watch volunteers are not sworn officers or law enforcement.

At regular training sessions that volunteers receive, deputies stress the fact that citizens are not to take action on their own, but to call a deputy if they see someone committing a crime.

"You just never know what someone can do these days," Gonzalez said. "We just ask them to be our eyes and ears."

With the community acting as the eyes and ears of the sheriff’s department, it frees deputies to try and focus more on prevention rather than enforcement.

However, despite the best efforts to prevent crime, calls to the department continue to increase.

According to the department, they are on pace to answer 30,000 calls this year, an increase of nearly 20 percent from last year. And all these calls are answered by Dobson’s 24 deputies.

With a stronger crime watch program, officials hope to cut down on the number of calls for more minor offenses.

One of the by-products that sheriff’s officials see coming from the crime watch program is a tighter sense of community and letting neighbors get to know each other.

"There was a time when everyone knew their neighbors," Gonzalez said. "But today, everyone’s so busy that they don’t know each other anymore."

Sheriff’s officials see in crime watch neighborhoods that everyone begins to know each other. Because of that some calls don’t happen.

The example was given of a dog barking. In a neighborhood without a crime watch program, a person wouldn’t be as willing to go to the door of a neighbor they don’t know to ask them to quiet their dog.

However, if the two neighbors do know each other, that person would be more likely to go directly to the person and ask them directly to quiet the dog rather than calling the sheriff.

That sense of community is also what helps make a crime watch program work.

According to the department, people are far more likely to keep an eye on a friend’s property as opposed to someone they don’t know.

As Baker County continues to grow, the crime watch program is one way to maintain a tight-knit community feel to the county.

"We strongly encourage neighborhoods and communities to contact us and start a crime watch program," Sheriff Dobson said. "It helps us prevent crime before it occurs."