Starting a Neighborhood Watch Program

An excellent project to start for neighborhood and home security is a neighborhood watch program. Many communities across the United States have already benefited by starting a neighborhood watch program. You shouldn't wait until crime has infiltrated your neighborhood streets before beginning your crime watch program, take charge and start one today. The added sense of security will provide a safe environment for your children to play in and your family to call home.

The first item on the agenda before starting your neighborhood watch program is to contact the local police department. They may have a current crime watch program in place which will give you extra resources to begin patrolling in your neighborhood. Many times police departments will use retired police vehicles or purchase surplus vehicles to use in crime watch programs begun by volunteers in the communities in their district or service area. Community watch programs assist the deputies while enabling the people of the towns to police themselves. It's a win-win situation for the police department and many times they are excited to help by providing meeting space, walkie-talkies, marked service vehicles, and may install crime watch, or neighborhood watch signs.

Before you begin your neighborhood watch program you should contact the families in your community to gauge interest in the program, and to see if anyone would like to volunteer their time to the initiative. This can be done through a community flyer, bulletin board, phone calls, or community meetings. Use these meetings as contact points to gain interested parties and to form a group of people to install and run the neighborhood watch program. If your local police department allows you to conduct meetings in their station, use the time to create weekly schedules for patrol, obtaining a personal police contact, a member roster, and the other items you may need to keep the program running successfully.

To make your neighborhood watch program a success don't try to do everything. Conduct the meetings and work with the local police department to delegate tasks to the volunteers you recruit. Many times you may find yourself with more volunteers than resources allow, which means you can schedule the volunteers just a few days a month which will keep them from feeling like it's too much work or inundating them with too many tasks. Try meeting once a month to review crime areas, recent happenings, and to let everyone voice their opinions on how the neighborhood watch program is progressing. You may find that crime in your neighborhood is concentrated in certain areas that you may need to patrol on a more frequent basis. During these meetings you should also work out the hours the patrol will take place, many neighborhood watch programs in and around my area utilize the sunset to sunrise patrol schedule. Other communities use constant daily patrol, or even just weekend patrol. If you can get crime watch signs or neighborhood watch signs from your local police department or by contacting your city officials, you should do so as these signs will help deter criminals from setting up shop in your community.