Trending
Both Mayor Eddie Sundquist and Kim Ecklund, his Republican challenger for mayor in the upcoming November election, want to revitalize the city's neighborhood watch program.
Sundquist launched Safer Jamestown N.O.W. in June in an effort to get the community more involved with policing. Among its goals is to re-establish neighborhood watch groups. Ecklund, meanwhile, signaled her support for neighborhood watch programs during a north side community forum last week. Before being elected to the council, Ecklund was president of the Citizen Police-Neighborhood Watch Coalition, an organization that helped about 30 neighborhood watch groups work with the city police, fire and development departments to deal with neighborhood issues.
Jamestown Police Capt. Scott Forster said the police department has tried to reboot neighborhood watch programs in the city with little success. So why have neighborhood watches gone the way of the dodo bird in Jamestown? As Ecklund noted last week, part of the problem may be an increase in the number of transient renters in many neighborhoods that decreases the number of neighborhood residents concerned about safety as apartments regularly turn over tenants. In some neighborhoods people may be scared to report regular drug crime as that business turns dangerous. Let's face it, the state's 2019 bail reform may play a role here too as people accused of minor crimes are charged and released to be in court later, possibly leading concerned citizens to simply deal with minor crimes rather than report them over and over again to police.
A 2002 study prepared for Congress by the National Institute of Justice and the University of Maryland had an interesting hypothesis regarding neighborhood watch that may have some bearing in Jamestown -- the same nuisance issues that drive complaints to the police department make conditions poor to participate in neighborhood watch.
"The primary problem found by the evaluations is that the areas with highest crime rates are the most reluctant to organize.... Many people refuse to host or attend community meetings, in part because they distrust their neighbors," researcher Lawrence Sherman wrote in the study. "Middle class areas, in which trust is higher, generally have little crime to begin with, making measurable effects on crime almost impossible to achieve."
If Sherman is right, then rebooting neighborhood watch in Jamestown will involve more than enticing people to a meeting by promising them hot dogs and pop. It will involve the hard work of rebuilding one's trust in their neighbors -- and that's a heavy lift in an age where connections are made via social media rather than walking across the street and talking to a neighbor.