Meals unite Claremont neighborhood

in Organizing, Safety

All it took to rally the neighbors was a little prime rib and an invitation.

“I know how easy it is to make friends when you’re a chef,” Crocker said with a chuckle. “So when I moved to Claremont, I thought I would combine both. I bought the largest prime rib I could find, put out fliers inviting people who lived around me to come and eat and waited. I thought I might have a lot of food to eat, but 40 people came, and the only thing on the agenda was to get to know each other.”

The spontaneous dinner invite led to driveway parties, where one person or family was asked to serve as host and people were encouraged to attend and to help out.

Little by little, the neighborhood got a bit bigger, as the neighborliness started extending farther down the street.

As people sat and ate, they started talking.

“We started sharing honest communications with each other. Then we started finding out that a truck had been broken into twice. Then we found out other families had had their cars broken into. My car was broken into twice. And a house had been burglarized during the day,” she said.

“I got mad. This was destroying my dream. I said, ‘I think we can handle this craziness,”‘ she said.

So she decided to talk to Claremont police Capt. Gary Jenkins about ways to protect her turf – from Mountain Avenue to Indian Hill Boulevard and north of Baseline Road to the Thompson Trail – which amounts to about 400 homes. Jenkins was more than enthusiastic.

claremont

Again, Crocker put the call out and 200 people attended a meeting with the Police Department. She collected e-mail addresses of the attendees.

“And I found out we now had an electronic communications board to use,” she said.

The concern and interest shown at the meeting resulted in the placement of 30 new Neighborhood Watch signs in the area.

“First, we wanted to get educated, and we did that. Then, we wanted to make sure our community continued,” she said.

The once loosely connected collection of homes now is a strongly forged neighborhood. The fall gathering is now a tradition.

Suzanne Sproul, Staff Writer. Read the full article: Meals unite Claremont neighborhood – DailyBulletin.com

Facts on Community Safety

in Organizing, Safety

The most effective way to create a safe community is by having community members, property managers and outside partners join together to plan and implement a comprehensive community safety plan.

Safety and Crime Prevention

  • Five out of every 1,000 urban residents were victims of an aggravated assault, and four out of every 1,000 suburban or rural residents were.
  • Urban households experienced all forms of property crime at rates higher than those for suburban or rural households.
  • Improved street lighting can reduce crimes by up to 25 percent.
  • Significant reductions in burglaries have followed the implementation of neighborhood watch programs.
  • Increased interactions between local police departments and communities led to a reduced crime rate and increased community members’ respect for laws and law enforcement officers.
  • Crime prevention and community safety programs bring communities closer by requiring residents to work together to achieve their goals.

Safety by Design

Properly designing a community can greatly reduce the opportunities for crimes to be committed. Features of designing for safety and crime prevention include:

  • Controlled access: Doors, walls, fences, alarms, locks and landscaping
  • Comprehensive surveillance: Video cameras, peep holes, window placement, walking clubs/neighborhood watch, signs, layout and police patrols

Resident Involvement
Residents must play a role in the safety program within your community. Without resident buy-in, a program’s effectiveness will be severely limited. Involving residents is accomplished through:

  • Surveys: Assess the perceptions, needs and desires of the residents; ask what they would do to make the community safer.
  • Committees: Foster the formation of a resident safety committee to work directly with each other, property managers and law enforcement to help develop a safety plan.
  • Volunteers: Motivate residents to volunteer by doing such things as participating in a neighborhood watch from their homes. Train residents in crime prevention.

via KnowledgePlex: Facts on Community Safety. This document is part of “Creating Opportunities for Families through Resident Services: A Practitioner’s Manual,” which provides guidance and resources for offering effective services to residents. Specifically, it appears in the Community Safety and Crime Prevention Services section, which helps organizations think through how to keep their property and their community safe.

Solving Chronic Nuisance Problems: A Guide for Neighborhood Leaders

in Organizing, Safety

Whether the nuisance is physical (such as blighted property) or behavioral (such as a drug house), the best solutions focus on the core elements that have allowed its continuing existence. This document identifies barriers to solving chronic nuisance problems, discusses ways that experienced leaders find solutions, and provides a set of references for pursuing specific nuisance abatement goals. It provides resources that lead you to examples of nuisance laws and case studies that cover how one town, one community, one neighborhood, or even one person has solved chronic nuisance problems. More importantly, it helps you understand how community leaders approach such problems–that is, the way they think about them–in order to achieve success.

via Enterprise Resource Database: Solving Chronic Nuisance Problems: A Guide for Neighborhood Leaders, 2001. John H. Campbell

Organizing for Safety: Transforming Community Activism Into Community Change

in Organizing, Safety

Notes from Organizing for Safety: Transforming Community Activism Into Community Change, by George Loew

Lessons learned

  • Organizing is more effective when it is done in support of a particular goal rather than only in opposition to an existing condition. While anger and frustration motivate temporary involvement, the coalition which forms around specific objectives is more likely to maintain enthusiasm and realize its stated goals. Police officers are problem oriented, and their presence can help keep a partnership focused on real change.
  • Action is important. Including a wide range of collaborators in the problem solving process is critical to identifying a mutually advantageous solution and generating necessary political support, but eventually, the organizer must have the confidence to communicate a vision and lead the partnership towards its objectives. The organizer cannot allow details and uncertainty to prevent forward progress. Police officers, with their action-oriented instincts, seem particularly well-suited to meet this condition.
  • An organizing effort that employs both incentives (carrot) and potential punishment (stick) in its outreach strategy is likely to encourage greater participation.
  • Local change does not occur in a vacuum. Neighborhoods compete for and rely on city, state, and national resources. Developing linkages to and an understanding of trends at these other tiers can help communities expedite the revitalization process by providing direction and capitalizing on broader momentum. The central participation of law enforcement in developing community-based responses offers an effective means to establishing those linkages and gaining that broader perspective.
  • Research helps. Whether compiling crime statistics,investigating ownership status of problem properties, or researching relevant statutes, gathering accurate and thorough data and background information helps identify the real or underlying community problems. It also adds credibility to a grassroots effort in the eyes of those controlling resource allocation. Organizers can use their findings to complement anecdotal evidence in developing a strategic response.