Sheriff Craig Nobles and the Long County Sheriff’s Office recently launched a new sex-offender registration and public-notification website called OffenderWatch. Long County now will be part of a nationwide network of more than 5,000 law-enforcement agencies, 40 of which are in Georgia.
The new service is designed to be a user-friendly website that enables residents of a region to search for convicted sex offenders and predators who may be close to their homes, places of work, schools, churches and day-care centers. The information is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week and is updated in real time by the Long County Sheriff’s Office as offender information changes and is reported.
As part of this new service, citizens may enter any address of interest to them and see a map and a listing of all offenders within a user-defined radius ranging between .25 miles and 2 miles of that address. Citizens then can register an address to be continuously monitored by the sheriff, who will send the concerned citizen an email alert if an offender or predator registers an address within the specified radius of the concerned citizen’s address.
Citizens may confidentially register as many addresses as they like for free.
“Citizens have a right to know who may be living near them and could potentially pose a threat to their families. The Georgia sheriffs using OffenderWatch have the most up-to-date information on all offenders registered in the state, and I am happy to be able to provide that information to them,” Nobles said.  
The sheriff has made available additional web-based resources designed to educate and inform the public on ways to keep their families safe. The program also enables the sheriff to verify that offender addresses do not violate any safety buffers that may be implemented around protected institutions in the county — such as schools, day cares and parks — and helps law enforcement schedule compliance checks for verifying information provided by offenders.                                  
Citizens can access the OffenderWatch registry at http://www.sheriffalerts.com/ga/long.