Neighborhood Watch
Are you part of a neighborhood watch? How did you get it started, or find out about it? If you aren’t part of one, there’s no better time than the present to join or start one in your neighborhood. By now, we all know that we are our own first response. The next closest person to you is your neighbor, so it makes sense to get to know them. If there is ever an emergency, you may have to depend on each other for help.
Nowadays with social media, it’s easy to find public pages or groups for your town. We have several in my small town, and it helps to know what’s happening around our general area. But it’s even more important to know who’s right next door, and across the road. I live in small enough town that when the time came for me to start our neighborhood watch, I was able to text a few neighbors, and find the others through social media. I explained the intent of my neighborhood watch and the biggest question from everybody was, “What’s the commitment for this?” It was clear that this wasn’t a group who wanted BBQ’s and meetings with local police. Heck, I have two officers on my road who I invited to join. Since I know my neighbors well, and knew they weren’t looking for a big commitment, I was comfortable enough to keep our neighborhood watch casual. We text each other if needed. Worst case scenario, if we lost comms, we’re all within a half mile of each other so we could get in touch very easily.
It’s not a hard process to start a neighborhood watch. It can be casual, like mine, or more official, which would be through the Neighborhood Watch organization or your local police. It you want a more involved neighborhood watch, you can hold regular meetings or get-togethers and you can invite local police to come talk with your group.
Whatever works for you, do it. It doesn’t matter if you touch base just a few times a year, or monthly. As long as everyone in your neighborhood watch knows the purpose, and how important it is to have that connection with each other, that’s what matters.
If you want more information about setting up your own neighborhood watch take our assessment in the link in the upper right hand and we will guide you through what you can do…or you can go down the google and YouTube rabbit hole and we all know how deep that rabbit hole goes.