Goals
- What Are the Goals of Neighborhood Watch?
- To increase community awareness, enhance individuals’ power of observation, and encourage mutual assistance and concern among neighbors to reduce crime. The crimes normally targeted are burglary and other property crimes prevalent to neighborhoods.
- To allow the concerns of the neighborhood to be presented in a unified voice to both the Sheriff’s Office and to other governmental agencies. When people work together as neighbors, they create a better place to live for all of them, as a genuine neighborhood.
- To develop a neighborhood action program where neighbors help each other by watching each other’s homes and reporting suspicious persons in their neighborhoods to the Sheriff’s Office. They allow law enforcement to train citizens on how to be pro-active by preventing crime and how to recognize and report criminal activities. With a heightened awareness and a “sense of community” achieved, criminals will find it much harder to work unnoticed in your area.
- To train citizens in various personal and physical security strategies and help them in making their home more secure. Most crimes are opportunistic and can be reduced or removed by simple crime prevention techniques. It provides the police a method to give the community information on home and personal security.
- To promote awareness techniques and reporting crime but not the physical confrontation of criminals. Watch groups are not vigilantes and do not assume the role of the law enforcement. Citizens are only asked to be more alert, observant, and caring and to serve as extra eyes and ears for law enforcement.
