We live in a very quiet, historic neighborhood in South Florida but in the past year, a neighbor’s home and several cars have been burglarized, threatening everyone’s peace of mind.
In the midst of all this, our neighbors have decided to be more vigilant so the other day it occurred to me that if we really thought this through we could use my good friend, social media, to fight crime and help make our families and homes safer.

The Twitter crime prevention ideas I’m going to outline for you here are probably not new but I’ve done some Google searches on this topic and I can’t find anything like it. Hopefully this neighborhood watch trick will be as useful to your neighborhood as it will be to mine.

Overcoming the Twitter challenge
The thought of using Twitter to fight crime seems logical to me. Twitter let’s you be as anonymous as you want to be and yet it’s traceable, which is part of why you need to use this tool effectively.

Before we discuss the Twitter tactic I’ve developed for my neighborhood it’s important to acknowledge that Twitter is not as ubiquitous as e-mail or Facebook and you may even need to convince your neighbors to open an account. The best way to describe Twitter to new people is that Twitter is text messaging to groups of people (like family or neighbors) that choose to follow you through your Twitter identity called a handle. An example of a Twitter handle is twitter.com/papiblogger. Using Twitter handles, you can follow your own family or friends or even celebrities that like to text message regularly.

If your neighbors don’t already have a Twitter account, your best bet is to help ...