The City Council's Public Safety Committee discussed bringing back active Neighborhood Watches to the city. P-J photo by Sara Holthouse

Another city resident is asking the City Council how to establish a Neighborhood Watch.

During Monday’s Public Safety Committee meeting, a city resident approach the committee about doing things to get residents and people in charge in the city to work together to make it a better place, including re-introducing the Neighborhood Watch.

There are currently no active Neighborhood Watch groups in the city, but there are still procedures in place for anyone who would be interested in starting one up again to be able to do that. Neighborhood Watch used to be very active in the city, but Police Chief Scott Forster said that when people in charge of those groups retired or went away, nobody picked it up again.

“We have packets of information and everything to register, to be a registered, active, Neighborhood Watch group,” Forster said. “We can send you a packet to your address and then you just need to go and get signatures, and it just has all of the information on how to start one.”

It was noted that not all police officers may be aware of this, as some have been told that all they needed to do was to put a sign up on their porch. Forster said not everyone knows how it works, but the packet is the correct way to go.

Councilman Tony Dolce, R-Ward 2 and committee chair, said there are technically 60 Neighborhood Watch groups on the books in the city, but that they can come and go.

“Usually they started with a particular event or issue and got active,” Dolce said. “Then, people move away, so they come and go. I also think a lot of it has to do with social media now and people connect more electronically than they used to, instead of having an old fashioned meeting.”

There is both good and bad to that, Dolce added, saying that it would be nice to connect with neighbors physically as well, and that sometimes there may also have been worries about retribution when it comes to Neighborhood Watch groups. Forster also noted that people have come down to the station and tried to form a group, but that it is time consuming when it comes to someone being in charge of it and setting up meetings. A lot of times, he said, they see there is a lot of motivation at the beginning, but then that motivation can fade if meeting nights do not work for everyone, or if the incident that made them want to start up is now farther in the past.

“It’s hard to keep people motivated and interested and going,” Forster said. “By all means, we would 100% help, the police department will help and facilitate anything we can if you can get a group together that wants to start something like this.”

Between 10 and 12 signatures are all someone needs signature-wise to start up a Neighborhood Watch group. Another similar thing that Dolce said used to be very popular in the city about 20 years ago was the National Night Out, where the police would go to different parts of the city with different events that were a national thing, and the fire department would be involved as well. People would come out and have cook outs and different kinds of events, and Forster said it was also a way used to get information about certain things.

“The reason some officers don’t know about it is probably because it has been so long since we’ve had an active group, that it hasn’t come up,” Forster said. “I only know about it because in my last role people started asking me about it, so I had to find out.”

Dolce added that Mayor Kim Ecklund also got her start as the head of the Neighborhood Watch coalition, something that he said used to be very active.

Block parties were also brought up as a way to bring people together and to bring the police in to help people come and learn more about each other. Dolce said people are more than welcome to have neighborhood block parties and invite the neighborhood representative and the police department to come and go around to talk and connect with people. There is also a similar process to starting a Neighborhood Watch to putting together a block party, with applications available for the block parties at the clerk’s office.