BY JOHN BRICE
THE LAFAYETTE SUN
LANETT — Local officials and area residents met Saturday, June 7, at the W.O. Lance park for a community meeting hosted by The Guardians neighborhood watch group. Seating was provided under a number of tents with free hot dogs, bags of chips and bottled water for every attendee. Several officers from the Lanett Police Department, as well as firefighters, Lanett Mayor Jamie Heard and council members were on hand to show their support for the cause of enhancing safety in the community.
President of The Guardians, Harold Henson, spoke about why the group was created.
“We are a neighborhood watch organization,” Henson said. “We are a group that are here with a measure of concern, a measure of disgust but also with a measure of love for our community. We love our community, we love this place and we are concerned by some of things that we see are going on. We are concerned with the crime, a lot of the illicit behaviors, the drug use and so on that is going on. The lack of concern, the litter in our streets. It is just very disheartening.”
Henson talked about his motivation for getting involved.
“We put this together today in hopes of reaching some more people, getting some more people engaged in helping us to make Lanett a safer and a more beautiful place,” he said. “Because it needs to be a better place for us to live and to work and to raise our families. Right now, I know there are a lot of people in our community who are scared to death to go outside. There are people in our community that are scared to death to put one of these signs up in front of their yard because they are afraid they will be targeted by criminals. This is a terrible shame.”
Mayor Heard spoke in favor of the group.
“This all started last year; I started having meetings in each district,” Heard said. “Of course, when we met with Ms. Thomas’ group they kept talking about a neighborhood watch. They kept talking about the crime that was going on in district four. Reverend Henson, he brought the idea and they started having meetings and they just never quit. Because of those meetings we have made district four a better district.”
Heard shared information about a specific situation that was impacted by the neighborhood group.
“There was one house there that I got calls about every day,” he explained. “It was discussed at every meeting that we had. We were able to get those people out of the house. A couple of weeks ago that house was torn down. Traffic has been much better over there. But it took all that effort to get it done. When we meet, don’t think we’re just meeting for district four. We want everybody in the community, every district to be a part of it.”
