Recently, an article was published by The Hawk Eye about neighborhood watches and how they are becoming more ineffective in the area. The article's title seems to insist that the neighborhood watch is defeated.
While there are many reasons why neighborhood watches are failing, there are still other factors in play as to why the neighborhood watches aren't holding up.
Many neighbors are often unreliable or too busy:
Living in an town with severe inflation for more than 40 years has created many individuals to either leave the city or stay behind and work their butts off to make ends meat. This can go with the factor of which people are constantly moving away, thereby leaving houses open to someone new.
When someone new comes along, it would be difficult to earn their trust and become reliable or not to help support the cause. Since crime in this town has been rising and new individuals are moving in from another state, its difficult to know whether the neighbor has a clean-slate record or just got out of jail for beating someone up.
Too much crime is happening all at once; police aren't reliable enough to handle the situation properly:
Another factor that I see as to why neighborhood watches are failing is because criminal activities have been constantly increasing. There is a scarcity of individuals being caught who have committed illegal acts.
This is often due to the lack of funding, training and apathy from the Burlington Police Department and its affecting the way they are catching criminals.
For example, officers usually unwillingly pursue someone to the extreme of arresting an individual, like looking into surveillance tapes or releasing the tapes to the public to help identify the criminals. This also includes high speed chases.
Without proper cooperation with law enforcement, neighborhood watches would be as useless as tits on a bull.
Officer Grimsaw is incorrect when it comes to limited resources. They have plenty of officers. IF they are willing to do neighborhood watches, they can cover a small portion of an area for a period of time followed by the next new area. The problem is many of the officers aren't willing to do that and that they want to instead do as little work as possible. That way they would be paid just as much as if they were to do the extra work. I don't see in buying three new squad cars would mean they are lacking resources.
Solution:
The only realistic solution in dealing with criminals breaking into ones home, mugging ones self or any other activity is by owning a firearm with proper licensing.
Another solution is moving out of Burlington and West Burlington completely.
There have been plenty of reports of thefts and muggings going on in the city that are getting away with stealing one's things. Criminals do this day and night without any fear of officers patrolling the streets regularly, like Osborn Street, GreenWay, or even South Hill.
Police are out manned and ill-trained to find a good chunk of criminals involved in the city to put behind bars.
