Short Stuff: Neighborhood Watch

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1:15Hey, and welcome to The Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and this is Short Stuff because Jerry's here for Dave. And we're talking about the Neighborhood Watch, so look out. That's right. I think the fact of this podcast is right off the bat. Yep. Because if you've ever seen a neighborhood watch, like the official neighborhood watch sign is in the National Neighborhood Watch Program official organization. If you've ever seen that sign and that, I was going to say silhouetted, but it's really just sort of a kind of a cartoony black figure on those orange and white signs. It looks very much like a film noir villain.

1:52And that guy actually kind of peering back over his shoulder. That dude has a name and it's Boris the Burglar. Yep. Very nice little trivia point. Yeah. I think one of the things that fascinates me about this and why I picked this one, and also thanks to Tara Yarlegata and Adoye Johnson, the first from How Stuff Works, the latter from the Howard University School of Law. But like when I see signs like that, they seem like like urban archaeological find because they're from the 70s, the very early 70s. And sometimes in old neighborhood and, you know, Atlanta's chock full of old neighborhoods. You can tell that sign was put up in 1972.

2:34Yeah. Yeah. And that neighborhood watch probably hasn't functioned for 40 years, you know. And I just find that super fascinating. So because of that fascination, I've dragged us into the discussion about Neighborhood Watch as it is. That's right, which was formed officially in 1972 after a rise in crime in the late 60s. Thank you, Lidded Gas. Again, the National Neighborhood Watch Program is the official name, and that's under the umbrella of the National Sheriff's Association. And it's a national organization in that they have guidelines. You can get some information and pamphlets on kind of how to run one in your neighborhood.

3:11Although we'll see that kind of depends on your neighborhood what you want to do with this program. Sure. But they don't like – there are way too many neighborhood watch programs, you know, local ones for them to really be involved in matter on a national level. It's just sort of the umbrella organization. Yeah, which can be a criticism as we'll see. But the whole idea is basically you can, the cops can get an assist from people who are kind of looking for problems in their neighborhood, or at the very least are on enough lookout that when it happens, they notice it, right? They don't just walk right past it.

3:48And then you can call the cops and then the cops come and then the burglar, Boris the burglar, is thwarted. And all of this is kind of based on what's called the Chicago School of Social Disorganization Theory. It's a sociological theory from the 20s and the 30s, which basically says if you have a neighborhood that doesn't have very strong social ties, so neighbors don't really know each other that well, they don't trust each other that well, and very little community control where people feel very confident about just committing crimes, that's the most vulnerable kind of neighborhood. And so a neighborhood watch essentially is meant to at least take care of the second one where it's like, you know, we're going to make sure you don't feel confident about committing crime.

4:29But it doesn't necessarily fulfill the first one, which is to bring communities together. Yeah, that's right. We should mention kind of briefly that for a little while after 9-11, the NSA got a grant from the Department of Justice where they rebranded as USA on watch. where they're like, hey, not only should you just be looking out for Boris the Burglar, but you should be looking out for terrorists in your neighborhood. But that grant ran out and they said, yeah, maybe we should just stick to being a neighborhood watch. Yeah, it went from keeping an eye on your neighborhood to spying on your neighbors, I think was essentially the spirit of it.

5:06Yeah, it's pretty great. This was the era when the postal workers, the mail carriers were expected to spy on everyone. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it was a very paranoid time. Yeah. Understandably so. It was a really rough time for the United States. Yeah, some would say there was a privacy grab that happened. Oh, I hadn't thought about that. Or a, you know, a lack of privacy grab, I guess. No, I get what you mean. An intrusive intrusion? Yeah. Let's take a break. We're saying it just right. Yeah, right. Let's take a break, man. Okay. And we'll come back and talk about whether these things actually prevent crime in the first place.

5:46All right, we'll be right back.

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8:12So, Chuck, the idea of a neighborhood watch makes sense, but not everything that is intuitively right actually pans out when put under scientific scrutiny. It turns out neighborhood watch programs do hold up under scientific scrutiny. At least one study from all the way back in 2006, not a lot of studies about neighborhood watch programs, apparently. They found 18 other studies and 15 of those showed that neighborhood watch programs seem to prevent crime like the like the neighborhood watch program came along and a decline in crime happened afterward. So it does seem like they can prevent crime.

8:50They don't necessarily thwart crime in progress, I guess. Yeah. I mean, they will tell you and proponents of the program will say like, hey, just having that sign up in your neighborhood is going to prevent crime somewhat because, you know, if a ne 'er-do-well sees that you're under neighborhood watch, they'll just move on to another neighborhood. Yeah. I don't know about that, but that's what they say. Well, it makes sense. Like, especially a non-professional who's just like, I'm going to break into houses. That might give them a second thought. So even if it prevents one burglary, it's a crime deterrent.

9:32Sure. If you want to organize one of these things, you can recruit people and get together. You can schedule some meetings. You can get some local law enforcement in there maybe to come to one of those meetings and kind of discuss how these things go. If you're like a really buttoned down neighborhood watch group, you might have an actual liaison with law enforcement. You might have a group coordinator and block captains and stuff like that. They might have sashes in the well-funded neighborhood watch group. They might. They might even have patrols. And this is where it can get a little dodgy.

10:03Yeah. Because there have been plenty of instances in the United States where these things have turned from sort of neighborhood watch where you see something and you maybe call the cops to people kind of acting on their own vigilante style. Yeah. Or people on their own calling the cops just because someone is guilty of, you know, being a person of color in their neighborhood. But that certainly happens all the time. Yeah, it does. So you talked about a lack of oversight and the fact that the National Neighborhood Watch Association just doesn't, they can't possibly keep up with them. I think there's something like 28 ,000 neighborhood watch groups that are registered right now.

10:46And probably a lot of them are defunct. But there's still, that's way too many for this probably just paper thin funded organization. to keep up with. So they're just like, hey, you know, they register with us and we tell them best practices, but if they turn into vigilante groups, we don't know about it. It has nothing to do with us. Some people are like, I don't know if that's true. You're actually encouraging the formation of these groups in the first place. You can make an argument that a neighborhood would come up with their own concept of a neighborhood watch anyway, probably. So it does seem like the National Neighborhood Watch Association is probably fairly, at least not guilty.

11:24Their hands aren't dirty, I guess is what I'm trying to say. But even still, they're quite aware that some of these neighborhood watch groups, whether they're registered or not, do evolve into vigilante groups. Yeah, I mean, I think nationally their aim is pure. But then when you get the wrong neighborhood and the wrong group of people, like happened here in the state of Georgia, you might have a neighborhood watch group targeting a family that they don't like being there. and sitting outside their house and digging through their trash and photographing the family and digitally audio recording them and monitoring their movements.

11:57That has happened. In Springfield, Missouri, the Klan set up a neighborhood watch and had signs saying, neighborhood watch, you can sleep tonight knowing the Klan is awake. Yeah, we talked about well-funded groups, too. Some of them will use police scanners. Some of them even have invested those flashing dome lights, like a la Naked Gun or Police Squad, for their cars when they're going to respond to a report. Yeah, you're not a cop. No, this is your neighbor who works in IT during the day and frankly drinks one or two beers too many each night. Right. showing up with a flashing light at your front door because your neighbor across the street thought that you were doing something suspicious or somebody was doing something suspicious at your house.

12:46That is not okay under basically any circumstance. Again, like you said, the concept is pure. It gets perverted way too easily because it gives power to the people who want the power because those are the ones very often who volunteer for this stuff. Yeah, for sure. And, you know, I talked about different crimes that were committed. Of course, the most obvious is when George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager in Sanford, Florida, in 2012. And Zimmerman, you know, supposedly was a Neighborhood Watch volunteer. And I think their Neighborhood Watch was not one of the official under the National Neighborhood Watch.

13:25Or at least the National Neighborhood Watch was like, no, they weren't us. But that's how far it can go. So, you know, we want to keep our neighborhood safe, but settle down. Man, that was a, this seems like a lifetime ago, doesn't it? Yeah, man. Yeah, that's, it was sort of, I mean, what, 2012? How many years ago was that? 13? Yeah. Yep. Right on the nose. So there is, yeah, there's nothing inherently wrong with keeping an eye on your neighborhood, especially if it helps you meet some of your neighbors and you guys work together to prevent people from breaking into your homes or selling drugs on your street or whatever.

14:02Like, it's totally understandable. It seems like, according to the National Neighborhood Watch Association, that the kind of the steps that they've laid out since 1972 are not necessarily followed. But that doesn't mean that groups are just not forming. They're forming in other ways. Yeah. Through like text chains, like, you know, neighborhood text threads. A lot of neighborhoods at Facebook pages. Yeah. Nextdoor is a big one. Yeah. Yeah. If you want to read some crazy off the chain stuff like go on to Nextdoor, it can be pretty entertaining. And then Ring, which is that that camera video doorbell, the first one, I think now is owned by Amazon.

14:46They partner with law enforcement and they're really doing their best to fill in the gaps in the police state. Yeah. And if you're if you want to get one of these started in your neighborhood and want to be on the up and up and do it the right way, you can go to that National Neighborhood Watch website and get officially registered. They will have some resources to kind of guide you along. But again, you know, do it the right way. It's not a crime to just be in your neighborhood. And you see plenty of, you know, videos every day on social media where somebody, you know, sometimes someone that does live in that neighborhood is even accosted because they're a person of color who dares to park in their own driveway and walk to their own front door.

15:28That has happened before. Yeah. Yeah, I think, well, geez, Chuck, short stuff's out on that bomber note. I think so. Okay.

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15:53Thank you.