Neighborhood Watch

The idea of the neighborhood watch is one which has been proven to be one of the most effective ways to decrease crime within a neighborhood community. The basic idea of the neighborhood watch centers around neighborhood residents paying attention and identifying suspicious happenings and alerting and reporting crimes to police department. Through Neighborhood Watch groups and standardized surveillance techniques, residents and neighbors can assist and help the law enforcement authorities catch kidnappers, rapists, drug dealers, or other suspicious person or groups who pose an immediate threat to the safety of the neighborhood while at the same time residents keep an eye out for each other including property. Studies suggest that the
Law enforcement officials believe that the Neighborhood Watch method is most operative in middle class neighborhoods across the United Sates where there is a large amount of residents owing their own homes or residents who have children. Apartment complexes and neighborhoods where they is always a steady influx of tenants moving in and out can have successful neighborhood watches as well but these areas usually demand a little bit more organizing and persistence for it to be fruitfully successful. Still, you can achieve successful neighborhood watches once there is a center core group of residents invested in the cause of the neighborhood watch.
In the more impoverished, low-income neighborhoods, the neighborhood watch concept can also be operative, but these neighborhoods face major challenges like unemployment, poor infrastructure and lots of loitering areas called blocks, along with drug dealers and abusers who can quickly threaten and dwarf the watch
In Phoenix's Isaac neighborhood which is located just off the Interstate highway interchange, criminals have been using that area located there for years a 60 acre stretch where burgularies, drug selling and rampant prostitution has been active for sevaeral years, so in 1995 the state of Arizona, Phoenix city department and Issac’s Neighborhood Action Committee started drafting up ways to help lower the crime rate and illegal activities. Support for this new project came from and was backed by the planning department, neighborhood services department and the street transportation department, With the help of local neigbourhood residents providing the needed expertise and relevant input, the neighborhood watch group devised a h a strategy for making the neighborhood safer by completely closing down one street and turning the other open stret into a one way street and ensuring that the damage edifices were removed. Since the C.P.T.E.D changes were made the neighborhood residents reported that the crime level in the neighborhood had greatly decreased (Brennan & Zelinka,