Community safety team members are looking out for criminals

They have no badges, no guns, and no arrest powers.

But what they lack in law enforcement authority, they make up for in knowledge of their neighborhoods.

They are the members of the Collier County Sheriff’s Office community safety teams, and they have quietly become their neighborhoods’ watchdogs, identifying issues and raising concerns that don’t necessarily show up on the agency’s radar.

“They’re kind of our eyes and ears out there,” said Collier Sgt. Mike Raines, who works in Golden Gate.

It was April 2008, as the foreclosure crisis began ramping up, that then-Undersheriff Kevin Rambosk first proposed community safety teams — voluntary partnerships of residents, law enforcement officers, business owners and other civic leaders — to help deal with the increasing number of abandoned homes. But while cleaning up abandoned homes was the original intent, the teams now focus on a variety of quality of life issues.

“It’s a neighborhood watch program that’s kicked up a notch,” Raines said.

The Golden Gate district is leading the way with 18 safety teams, followed by the East Naples and North Naples districts with four each, and the Golden Gate Estates, Everglades and Immokalee districts, which each have one team so far, the Sheriff’s Office reported.

The Sheriff’s Office has a good grasp of crime in the different neighborhoods, analyzing crime trends from a variety of angles, North Naples Sgt. Jake Walker said. But sometimes it’s the smaller issues — broken windows, unkempt lawns, speeders — that most concern residents, and that deputies may not be aware of.

“We work to resolve those issues with the various stakeholders involved,” Walker said.

“We chose areas that don’t typically have strong homeowners associations for our first four teams,” Walker said.

Deputies began drumming up support for the safety teams by doing bicycle patrols, meeting with residents, and inviting them to a kick-off meeting, Walker said.

“It was a lot of brainstorming,” Martin Jelliffe, 63, who lives off Solana Road, said of the first meetings he attended. “What’s going on in your area? What would you like to see?”

After the first meeting, attendees were loaded into transport vans and driven around their neighborhood to point out concerns.

“It might be a drug house. It might be a house with juveniles that are unmanaged by their parents,” Walker said. “It might be foreclosed homes, abandoned homes, or homes with substantial code violations.”

Over the summer, the safety teams helped plan National Night Out events, and in early September, helped get the word out for community clean-ups, which took place Sept. 19.

Two large trash bins were set up in an empty lot at the intersection of El Rado Street and Alhambra Circle for the North Naples clean-up. People from around the neighborhood dropped off yard waste, old furniture, tires and plastic Christmas trees.

During monthly meetings, the members bring up new concerns, and the deputies discuss how previous concerns were resolved.

“Every month there is progress,” said Ann De Piero, a member of the Michigan Avenue team with her husband, Tony De Piero, 46.

“It’s the community kind of taking charge of their own neighborhoods,” Raines said. “It’s the kind of thing we’ve been trying to cultivate all along.”

Read the full story: Watch out: Community safety team members are looking out for criminals » Naples Daily News. By Ryan Mills