Law Enforcement Utilizes New Techonology to Improve Community Ownership Among Youth

Our neighbors in Virginia are trying out the use of a new texting and email system to address the issues of substance abuse and crime in their community.

One county has implemented this system for students in the county’s middle and high schools to send anonymous emails or text messages.  Local County Sheriff Count Lane Perry say, “Emailing and texting are big things to the youth of today, and now, if a students sees something that really bothers them,” he said authorities can help before a situation “gets out of hand.”

“Part of this effort also is to try to keep drug use and abuse from increasing,” Perry said. “The young children who get lost today on drugs will be the criminals of tomorrow, and we know there are a lot of good kids in the school system who don’t like it when they see their friends lost to drugs. They don’t like it when they walk into a bathroom and see drugs being done, or when they see someone in the parking lot selling drugs,” he said.

But, “anything that concerns students can be reported,” he said. For example, “say someone’s smart phone is stolen” and a student knows who took it, Perry said. That information could be passed to authorities via the new system.

A secondary reason for starting the project is a challenge from Perry that “everyone should start taking ownership of their environment. We are not asking anyone to endanger themselves, but just to take ownership of their environment to help clean it up.”

The system also is intended to send a strong message to those students engaging in poor behaviors.

“We want them to know that they don’t have free reign to engage in bad behaviors anymore.  If they go into the bathroom, if they are selling drugs in the parking lot or coming to school late because they are selling them off school property, I want them thinking that someone will know, that someone will report the incident to law enforcement” and that there will be consequences, Perry said.

“This system was created to give the kids an anonymous means of reporting drug information and violence in their environments,” he added.

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