Lethbridge communities use social media to keep neighbourhoods safe, coinciding with RCMP campaign​

While Alberta RCMP are dedicating two months to sending out daily reminders for residents to keep their properties secure and safe, people in Lethbridge have found another way to look out for each other.

“It’s very much a community watch kind of program, I guess you could call it,” said Sarah Krogman, administrator of the Lethbridge Legacy Ridge Community Facebook group.

At 9 p.m. every evening, RCMP use their social media pages to encourage citizens to buckle down and keep their property safe by asking questions such as:

• Have you double checked your garage is locked?
• Are your motion sensor lights on and working?
• Are your windows secured?

By doing this, officers hope residents will form a routine of locking up valuables to minimize the risks of theft, something the closed Facebook group has aimed to encourage for the past five years.

“I believe this site kind of gives us that connection, that we can look out for each other, provide information for each other and provide even footage that can maybe protect our kids and our properties a little bit better and just come together as a community,” Krogman said Wednesday.

Krogman and her husband first created the group in 2014 with the hope of facilitating discussion about things important to the community, like the development of parks. Now, the group has more than 850 members with posts and footage that help report crimes in the area.

“We have shared footage on our page from our own cameras of, say, a suspicious vehicle that was mentioned and we have footage of that vehicle doing laps on our street,” Krogman said.

These small community groups that exist across the city don’t go unnoticed by the Lethbridge Police Service.

“If you have the neighbours coming together and saying, ‘Yeah, we notice this rash of break and enters or car entries,’ or whatever it’s going to be, they’re more apt to let us know,” said Const. Shawn Davis with the LPS Community Resource Unit.

“Our stats can go up and we can focus our patrols more to those areas.”

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While Davis agrees these groups can be helpful in solving or deterring crimes, he noted there are other precautions you can take such as registering your security cameras with the city and never leaving valuables in vehicles — a sentiment Alberta RCMP echo in their evening social media updates.