Council Discusses a New Direction to City’s Neighborhood Watch Program

In last night’s worksession, the Council discussed the revitalization of City’s Neighborhood Watch program. City’s Public Service Director Bob Ryan, Public Service Officer Dino Pignataro and the Neighborhood Watch Coordinator Robert Boone.

A few years back, the Council formed a Neighborhood Watch steering committee to revitalize the program. It also hired a Public Safety Officer (Mr. Pignataro) to help strengthen the Neighborhood Watch program in the city.

Unfortunately, the program has not been getting a lot of traction, especially in certain neighborhoods.

One suggestion to revitalize the program was to allow local neighborhoods take greater control in the program. In other words, the program will be driven by local civic leaders, including elected officials, such as the local council members.

I am personally hopeful that this new approach has a good chance to succeed.

Neighborhood Watch is a grass root community movement and thus it can grow from the community itself. In other words, we ought to take a bottom up approach, instead of taking a top down approach. Leadership should be grown from the residents within the community, and should not be imposed on them.

Council members can play a significant role in building the program. Almost all Council members maintain a list serve and they know the residents living in their respective districts / constituencies. Thus it should be fairly easy for them to reach out recruit them to the program.

I will keep you all posted as we make progress in building the program in our part of the city.