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Highland Park, Tenn., Residents Using New App as Early Warning Tool

With the new application called Village Defense, users can send an alert or use the app's group chat feature to post photos, details or follow-up questions about crimes as they occur.

(TNS) -- A few days ago a man in Highland Park saw two teenagers walking down the street -- one of them carrying a handgun in plain sight.

The man logged on to Facebook to alert his neighbors. But not everyone saw his warning, and not everyone saw it right away. So Olga de Klein, the safety chairwoman of the Highland Park Neighborhood Association, whipped out her smartphone, opened a brand-new application called Village Defense and typed a short message.

"Two black males spotted at Willow and Bennett, one with hoodie and handgun. 911 has been called and is on the way."

She pressed "send" and the app instantly delivered a notification to the phone of every other neighbor who had signed up for the free service.

"Immediately people could be on the lookout," she said. "Usually when [suspects] see the police cars they disappear. But with an alert, people can be on the lookout and tell police, 'Oh, they went here,' or 'They're over there.'"

It's the old-fashioned neighborhood watch revamped for the digital age. The smartphone app, Village Defense, allows users to report events or crime as they happen, in real time, to everyone else in the neighborhood who is using the app.

Users can send an alert or use the app's group chat feature to post photos, details or follow-up questions about crimes as they occur, said Village Defense co-founder Nathan Black, who is based in Atlanta. The app has been live for about two months and in that time has been deployed in about 500 neighborhoods across 160 cities, he added.

Neighborhoods can be as small as 20 houses or as large as 1,500, Black said. He estimated that at least 25 percent of the people in a neighborhood need to sign up for Village Defense in order for the app to be effective as an early warning.

"The more people who use it, the better it is," he said.

Highland Park is the first neighborhood in Chattanooga to try Village Defense, which includes both a free and paid version. So far about 30 people have signed up for the free version, de Klein said.

The neighborhood association may consider buying the product if it works well, she added. That version goes for $125 a month for an entire neighborhood and includes additional features, like the ability for alerts to be sent as a phone call to landlines, not just smartphones.

The app has been used to issue an alert about a police chase that ended when an escaped inmate crashed a van on South Chamberlain Avenue, to caution about a panhandler and to warn about gunshots that rang out Thursday.

"To tell you the truth, we're still in the infancy with this," de Klein said. "But it goes out faster than Facebook or email. I always check my texts right away if I get a little ding."

Police have worked with residents of Highland Park regularly for years, even launching a two-day prostitution sting last week after complaints and tips from residents. Now, de Klein hopes the app will boost those ties.

Black said feedback from police officers in areas where Village Defense is being used has been generally positive.

"A lot of times now when they show up there are a lot more witnesses," he said. "There is a lot of power in real-time connectivity."

©2015 the Chattanooga Times/Free Press (Chattanooga, Tenn.)