Terrell Police Service
Neighboorhood Watch

Todd A. Miller - Police Chief
Nate Hauger - Community Police Coordinator

Anyone can be a victim of burglary or other crimes. Despite our best precautions, we often feel alone and vulnerable to crime. But there is a vital protection tool available - something residents in a community can do by banding together, in connection with the Terrell Police Service, to prevent crime before it happens.

• The Neighborhood Watch Program
• How to get started
• Getting organized
• Developing Citizen Awareness
• Neigborhood Watch Brochure

The Neighborhood Watch Program

Here’s a community-based program that’s been proven to deter crime. The National Neighborhood Watch program, sponsored by the National Sheriff’s Association since 1972, unites law enforcement agencies, local organizations and individual citizens in a community wide effort to reduce residential crime.

Thousands of these programs have been developed around the country, breaking down the isolation of neighbors as they work together and with law enforcement officers. It is a remarkably successful anticrime effort, as participants work together as a true community– neighbor looking out for neighbor.

• Any community resident can take part– young and old, single and married, renter and home owner.
  
• A few concerned residents, a community organization, or just one concerned citizen can spearhead the effort to organize a Neighborhood Watch.
  
• Your neighborhood officer will help you get started.
  
• Members learn how to make their homes more secure, watch out for each other and the neighborhood, and report suspicious activities to the police.
  
• You can form a Neighborhood Watch group around any geographic unit: a block, apartment building, park, business area, or housing complex.
  
• Watch groups are not vigilantes. They are extra eyes and ears for reporting crimes and helping neighbors.

How to get started

Neighborhood Watch helps to build pride and serves as a springboard for efforts that address other community concerns, such as recreation for youth, child care, and affordable housing.

Many of your neighbors may wish that a program like Neighborhood Watch already existed in their area, but don’t know how to start one. They may not realize just how simple it is.

If you don’t start a Neighborhood Watch program in your area, perhaps no one will. But once you take these first simple steps, you may be amazed at how easy it is to organize the program and what a difference it will make.

• Form a small planning committee.
  
• Decide on a date and place for an initial neighborhood meeting.
  
• Contact your neighborhood officer for help in organizing your meeting. The neighborhood officer will discuss your neighborhood’s problems and needs with the group. If you do not know who your neighborhood officer is, you can contact the Terrell Police Department. They will put you in contact with him or her.

Getting Organized

Contact as many of your neighbors as possible using fliers provided by your neighborhood officer.

Once your program is beginning to get under way, there are several concrete steps you should take to make the organization solid and successful:

• Contact your neighborhood officer for help in training members in home security and reporting skills, and for information on local crime patterns.
  
• Select a Neighborhood Watch coordinator and block captains who are responsible for organizing meetings and relaying information to members.
  
• Recruit new members, keep up-to-date on new residents, and make special efforts to involve the elderly, working parents, and young people.
  
• Work with your neighborhood officer to put up highly visible Neighborhood Watch signs and decals. These alert criminals that community members will watch and report their activities - often, this is enough to discourage them!
  
• Work with your neighborhood officer to organize citizen patrols, on foot or in vehicles, to monitor certain areas at assigned times and shifts. Lost children, stranded motorists, stray dogs, damaged street signs or traffic signals, wandering cattle, and auto accidents are often discovered by citizen patrols.

Neighbors look for…..

• Screaming or shouting for help.
  
• Someone looking into windows of houses or parked cars.
  
• Unusual noises.
  
• Property being taken out of houses or buildings where no one is at home, or the business is closed.
  
• Cars, vans, or trucks moving slowly with no lights or apparent destination.
  
• Anyone being forced into a vehicle
  
• A stranger running through private yards or alleyways.
  
• A stranger sitting in a car or stopped to talk to a child
  
• Abandoned cars

  Don’t investigate these problems on your own! Report these incidents to the police. Alert neighbors of such situations.

Developing Citizen Awareness

Periodic meetings of your Neighborhood Watch Group should be used to develop programs to heighten citizen awareness of and proper response to suspected or actual criminal activity. Speakers from the police department as well as from a wide range of community organizations can address such topics as:

• Recognizing suspicious activity and learning how to report it.
  
• Organizing victim assistance programs.
  
• Establishing “safe houses” for children in trouble.
  
• Setting up daily Crime Watch broadcasts, mobilizing scanner owners, and publishing neighborhood newspapers with security tips and updates.
  

Once you get started in organizing a Neighborhood Watch, there is virtually no limit to the innovative ways to combat crime and increase involvement of members of your community. Your neighborhood will not only become safer and more secure, but will have the added benefit of neighbors brought closer together, with opportunities to rekindle the sense of community that many areas of the country have lost over the years.

A strong, healthy, united community is one of the
strongest deterrents to crime!
But it all has to start somewhere.
It can start with you - beginning today!

Contact your Neighborhood Officer or the Terrell Police Service Community Police Coordinator Nate Hauger. Officer Hauger can be reached at 972-563-9064 or by email at nhauger@cityofterrell.org.