Safety In A Small Town
Small town safety is something I’ve learned from living in a small town most of my adult life and am sharing some tricks to keep you, your family, and your home secure
Y’all know all I do is watch true crime shows and listen to true crime podcasts. They’re my favorite past time. But I also low key am afraid I’ll end up a victim on one of those shows one day. So, I’m actually pretty paranoid and cautious of my surroundings. PEOPLE ARE CRAZY OKAY?!
I love our neighborhood! We live in a cul-de-sac which wasn’t a must have, but has been a great added bonus. In fact, in my very first post ever on this blog, I talked about how much I loved our hood and our neighbors. And praise God for great neighbors who welcome our daughter with open arms when she just opens the front door and goes to see said neighbors ALONE while the sitter is putting her brother to bed AND GIVE ME A LITERAL FREAKING PANIC ATTACK.
We have debated getting a security camera for our house for a LONG time, but never pulled the trigger for one reason or another. And then I happened to stumble on Flock Safety which is what you may ask? A security camera for YOUR ENTIRE NEIGHBORHOOD! Who would have known?!
Why choose Flock?
This thing is amazing. It is specifically designed to read license plates. Not only license plates, but license plates at night. Going over 50 miles per hour. Even 75 feet away. Lemme tell you – if a crime is committed, it’s going to be hard to escape. Especially in our neighborhood since there is literally only one way in and out.
Oh, and don’t worry about if they’re on foot. The Flock camera is designed to catch people, cars, motorcycles, bikes, even animals. So you can even see if your dog is sneaking out of your house at night doing hood rat stuff with its friends when it should be sleeping peacefully in your house. Oh. It also catches people getting caught by their neighbor taking photos to use in this post.
Small town safety from anywhere
There is a portal to log in to this camera and you can access it easily from either your phone or computer. Which can be super helpful in dealing with things when you may be out of town, but want to keep a pulse on the hood.
Get your neighbors in on the fun
You can add users to this account by a simple neighborhood link so they can access footage if they so desire. Another thing I love is that Flock begins to learn and recognize patterns in cars it sees and you can mark them as part of your neighborhood or not.
Customer service
Flock’s customer service team (and I’ve worked directly with 3 of them in all this) has the most incredible people. Like almost seems unreal because they’re just SO nice and SO happy all the time. Even when the installation gets delayed because you have a paranoid neighbor who calls the city and then contacts them directly and then sends them an email and then contacts them on LinkedIn and makes them move the camera. (Yes. This actually happened).
Real life example of small town safety
I swear to you guys I did not plan this, but I couldn’t have scripted this better if I tried. We have lived here 2 years and I have not one time locked my car door. I just feel that safe. But 2 weeks ago, our entire neighborhood had all of our cars broken into. So, what did we do when we called the cops? First thing we did was look at the footage and FOUND THE CAR. In the dark around 3:00 AM.
Now, in all transparency, this is not the car we caught. Ha. This is actually MY car and I promise I didn’t do any car thefts; I just wanted to show you how clear this thing is even at night. Do you see the percentage of how clear my license was on the left side? 90%! But the truth is you can 100% see the letter and number combo.
The next thing we did was we added the officers involved in the investigation of the case to our system so that they have access to look and see if the car had been in our neighborhood “scoping things out” at any other time. We were also able to contact Flock support who was able to help sharpen the image a bit and give us the make and model of the car.
Here’s what’s great about this thing – it has a search function. You can enter a date and time and any other relevant info and bam. You get results for that period.
We actually don’t have an HOA here, but the whole neighborhood got a letter in the mail and asked if anyone would want to be on the board and start one so that we can begin to raise money to keep this camera on a more permanent and long term basis because we are already seeing so many benefits. Don’t worry. Jordan already said he’d absolutely do it so we’ll see how that goes. At least we don’t have anything else going on and aren’t busy people at all.
I promise you this thing has already more than paid for itself just by its safety and security, but you should totally look into one, regardless of whether or not you live in a big city or a smaller town! You can even use the code FLOCK19 to save 10% should your HOA decide to get one!
Big city safety, small town safety, whatever. It is just comforting to know we can keep not only our family safe but all of our neighbors that we love!
This post is written in partnership with Flock Safety and we are so grateful, but I promise you all opinions are my own. To read my full disclosure policy, click here.
