Dear Concerned Citizens of Tift County

With Halloween tonight, it is crucial that you know which houses your children should avoid when trick-or-treating.  I invite you to view our website, www.tiftsheriff.org, research neighborhoods and addresses that are important to you and register to receive e-mail notifications on registered sex offenders within proximity of these addresses.  The most beneficial aspect of the address monitoring feature is that once your important addresses and e-mail addresses have been registered, the system will automatically alert you via e-mail when an offender moves within a specified radius of the registered address.

Register any and all addresses where your children spend time; for example friends, grandparents or babysitter's addresses.  Registering for this confidential e-mail alert service allows us to monitor you important addresses for you, thereby keeping you up-to-date on newly registered offenders and making it unnecessary for you to have to check these addresses daily or even weekly.  

While visiting our website, you can also view and print important safety tips to review with your children.  The e-mail notifications discussing the various safety tips help increase awareness.  It is the goal of our office to provide accurate information to the public regarding the dangers of sexual predators and to further build community awareness.  To help us achieve this goal, we utilize OffenderWatch® to manage and monitor the registered offender's whereabouts as well as conduct compliance checks of know addresses within the community.  OffenderWatch ® is the nation's leading sex offender management and community notification too and we began using this software solution in 2007.  Since then OffenderWatch ® has emailed 11,624 notifications to our citizens and 296 citizens registered e-mail addresses to receive real-time e-mail sex offender notifications.  We are successful in achieving these results because OffenderWatch ® provides the most accurate and timely information available to the public.

 “Community Notification” empowers you with the knowledge that can be used to protect yourself and your family from becoming victims. I firmly believe that the more educated and aware a community is of what and where the dangers lurk, the more success we have with our community notification program.

Happy Safe and Happy Halloween,

Sheriff Gene Scarbrough