Cactus Village Community

Crime Goes Down in Areas with Neighborhood Watch

Jul 21, 2003

Citizen Patrols Working: Police Report Crime Goes Down in Areas with Neighborhood Watch

By Tasha Williams
June 30, 2003

Reprinted with permission from The Salt Lake Tribune (Utah) June 21, 2003
Hearing a gunshot at 4 a.m. isn't a common occurrence on the East Bench, so when Mike Arnow was awakened by the sound during a vehicle burglary outside his home, he knew he needed to get involved.

Arnow decided to take part in Salt Lake County's Mobile Watch Program to make his neighborhood safer.

A writer and video producer, Arnow now spends an hour and a half each month with a partner patrolling in Morningside, the area west of Wasatch Boulevard and about 4000 South, looking for suspicious activity.

"Just because you live on the East Bench, you can't assume you live in a low-crime neighborhood," Arnow said. About 50 people now patrol the community, Arnow said.

"It gives you a sense of empowerment, so you're not simply sitting by and griping and complaining when there are problems in your community," Arnow said.

Since the group began patrolling, property crimes in the area have gone down 22 percent, said Mindy Hendrix, crime prevention specialist for the Salt Lake County Sheriff's Office.
"Getting the crime down 22 percent is good," Arnow said, "But it's not good enough."
Arnow said the training he took through the Mobile Watch Program taught him to spot crime even when he's not patrolling. On his way home from work late one night, Arnow said he spotted a teenage boy who apparently had broken into a truck.

"That's the best thing about it, it increases your awareness. You can be effective even if you're not on patrol," Arnow said, even though the boy wasn't caught.

Salt Lake County has 12 active mobile neighborhood watch programs, where trained citizens patrol the community with signs on their cars. One unit even has about 230 members, Hendrix said.

Mobile Watch's success proves community-oriented programs are an effective deterrent against crime, Hendrix said.
Other programs, like the 80 or so Salt Lake County neighborhood watch programs, also benefit police.

"The neighborhood knows what belongs in their neighborhood, what is normal in the neighborhood and what is suspicious in their neighborhood," Hendrix said.

Suspicious-activity calls to dispatch increase in areas where neighborhood watch programs exist, Hendrix said.

Utah police departments also take other more personalized steps to keep the community involved.

Sandy officials have dissolved their community-oriented policing unit and are now incorporating those ideas into patrol officers, said Sgt. Michelle Burnette.

"It's really our way of trying to have every police officer have this mind-set of working with the community before something happens," Burnette said.

That relationship is important enough that in April, Sandy police joined citizens for a volunteer saturation night. Members of the crime prevention bureau taught about 120 volunteers to look for suspicious activity, things like curfew violations and people or vehicles out of place, said Amy Bryant, crime prevention specialist for Sandy.

"The big one we teach is to trust your judgment," Bryant said. "If you feel like something is off or weird, it probably is suspicious. That's a lot of how police officers do their work."

Another saturation night isn't planned until the fall. Bryant said it's impossible to determine how many crimes were prevented, but, in three hours, police officers arrested five individuals from the tips of volunteers.
"All they [volunteers] had to do was show up and be the eyes of the police department," Burnette said.

To be part of the annual Citizens Academy in St. George, the police department offers a monthlong class to residents who pass a background check, said Cheri Seltzer, chief assistant in the St. George Police Department.
The class covers everything from orientation with administrators to demonstrations with the bomb squad.

Most of the Citizens Academy graduates move on to other volunteer organizations, Seltzer said. . . ☻