Tips to Help You Organize a Neighborhood Crime and Safety Watch System

In America right now, every single neighborhood needs a neighborhood watch system in place for their children this year. Every single person in each neighborhood is responsible for all of the children. We are simply back to the caveman years, where little boys like Beaver will be eaten alive if they stroll away from their safety-zones.

During the 1940's and 1950's stay-at-home Mother's monitored children's activities as they played in neighborhoods. In the 1960's and 1970's neighborhoods became places where strangers lived, with working parents trusting their children to take care of themselves during the day. In the 1980's and 1990's our neighborhoods degenerated further, with higher crime levels, and complete with larger safety issues for our children to worry about.

Today, crime in America is completely out-of-control. It isn't always safe for an adult to be walking on the streets; we must try to protect our children. Caring adults must take on responsibility for watching over the children in their neighborhoods through a group-effort neighborhood watch system.

How to organize your neighbors requires a little pre-organization thought. You will want to define your neighborhood boundaries, find out what resources you have in your neighborhood, and start brainstorming ideas on how to blend your available resources into a working neighborhood watch system. Below are some examples to help you get started:

Decide how big your neighborhood should be, and what its boundaries are. If all of the local children like to walk 6-blocks over toward the swimming pool during the summer, this should be taken into your considerations. Children often have their own concepts about where their neighborhood starts and stops, it is important to know this information too so that you can protect the places that the children are attracted to with your neighborhood watch system.

List all of the community youth groups that have a member in your neighborhood. Think of things like scouts, church groups, recreation classes, after school programs, internet clubs, and music lessons. You may want to ask your children what youth activities their friends are participating in to make your list complete. At the end of this list, add the words, 'Senior Citizen Center' because this group will be in your plans.

Take a walk through your defined neighborhood with a tape recorder. Make notes on overgrown areas and other hazardous looking places. If there is a barking dog in a yard, think about where the children might walk (in the street?) as an alternative route around the dog. Watch for as many hiding places, hazards, and childhood alternatives to what adults might do that you can find. Go out on two different days, to make sure that you did not miss anything.

When you are armed with your list indicating neighborhood size, possible resources, and possible hazards you are ready to call your local police or sheriff's department for some help. Explain to them that you would like to set-up a neighborhood watch to help protect the children, and ask them to supply you with any ideas or resource material that they have access to. Listen to what they tell you to do, and take notes. You will be in partnership with law enforcement on your neighborhood watch system.

Start calling everybody on your youth organization list to ask how they feel about starting a neighborhood watch system. Listen to their important issues instead of promoting your own; you are on a friend gathering mission with these first phone calls. Everybody will tell you that they are too busy to help, but things will all work out later. Just get to know who is out there working with children, and what their issues are. Ask everybody who it is that they think you should talk to, and contact those people as well.

After you have contacted the police to get their neighborhood watch information, and have made your initial calls to youth organizations to see who might be willing to help you with this project, it is time to take another walk through your neighborhood with a tape recorder. This time you are looking for homes that appear to belong to somebody who is at home all day. Look for senior citizens, handicapped people, people watching you walk by from a window, and yards with a garden or project that is cared for daily. Note these addresses into your tape recorder; people at home watch neighborhoods.

Set up a meeting after you are armed with your first information about what your neighborhood is, who may be willing to help, information from law enforcement, what the neighborhood hazards are, and who appears to be home all day. This first meeting is to brain-storm ideas from all community members, and to find 3 or 4 people who can work together to make your neighborhood watch system start to function.

The meeting should be held in a place where everybody will feel comfortable going to despite ethnicity, religious beliefs, or group affiliations. Check with your local Senior Citizen Center to see if they have a meeting room available and ask their director to invite his active seniors to attend your meeting. Then, go knock on every door in your neighborhood to personally request that they attend your meeting.

Pick somebody from your youth organization list, call, and ask if their group would like to make some posters for you to hang around town announcing your event. You will want to back this up with some flyers of your own to distribute. Asking people for specific one-time help towards a project allows busy people to be involved without feeling threatened about total commitment. You may want to dial for some help on refreshments, scrap note paper for people to use, and an after meeting clean-up crew too.

As you are setting up your meetings, remember that you may have people speaking in more than one language. You will want to plan ahead for a translator to be available so that everybody feels comfortable. After you have become acquainted with your Senior Citizen community, they will become your right-hand man. Seniors are home every day; some enjoy being involved with community events, and most enjoy helping children.

Who does what in your neighborhood watch system is going to be entirely up to your group to decide. After you have heard everybody's ideas about what might have to be done, your chosen 3 or 4 leaders will have to hold a small meeting to get all of your information into some kind of a usable list of material to work from. You will need to pick just a few simple goals to start with, adding more as your group becomes more experienced.

Your first goals may be: 1. Get the city to clean-up overgrown lots, and remove abandoned cars. 2. Ask for people who are home daily to display 'safe house' signs in their windows so that children know where to run if they need help. 3. Arm all children in the neighborhood with a cell phone capable of dialing 911. Some old cell phones do not need to be in service to dial 911, making this a free project from donated old phones. 4. Set up a fun event so that all children in your neighborhood will feel like current friends.

If you start off slow with your neighborhood watch system, taking just a few little goals at a time, people will see you accomplishing those goals and be more willing to become involved in the future. One of the keys to success while attempting to mix various people into a solid community group is to always make sure that you are communicating with every person in the community. Groups fail quickly when they become social events for just a few chosen people. Stay in contact with everybody.

How to educate the children about why you are setting up a neighborhood watch system for them is an issue that will be handled differently in each home. Children are smart; they might not know the reasons behind random shootings, rumors of sexual assaults, violence in or near their neighborhoods, gang activity, the need to be afraid of strangers, or why you are constantly telling them to be careful as they hop onto the school bus in the morning... but, they've got the basics down. Be careful - it's not safe out there.

So, while knowing that your children already understand that our world has many bad things in it that can them, there shouldn't be any major concerns about them becoming more afraid of their neighborhood than they already are. If you promote your new neighborhood watch system as a fun way to try to make it safe for everybody to play outside, then the children will accept this new idea as something nice happening and respect you for your participation.

Resources:

Many organizations have information available on how to keep your children safe, and some offer free packages of information that can help you while you are participating in a community neighborhood watch system. Here are some links to explore:

'PTA Parent Resources' Click here to explore this neighborhood watch system resource.

'Girl Scouts of America' Click here to explore this neighborhood watch system resource.

'Boy Scouts of America' Click here to explore this neighborhood watch system resource.

'National Sex Offender Registry' Click here to explore this neighborhood watch system resource.

'Neighborhood Watch: National Crime Prevention Council' Click here to explore this neighborhood watch system resource.