Neighborhood Watch Meeting
with Bill Murray

by a Neighborhood Watch member

Bill Murray and his Community Policing website can make all the difference for a Neighborhood Watch. The information presented on the LACP website can be empowering. My Neighborhood Watch had an experience that drove this home.

Our Neighborhood Watch was at an important juncture. Our small group is a newer one and had been meeting for about 9 months. These nine months focused on a particularly out-of-control apartment house with a history of lawlessness. This lawlessness has persisted in spite of the changing demographics of the surrounding area. Many blamed all the problems of our neighborhood on the presence of "the apartment building."

After these many months of working with Department of Housing, Council District, the Police, Street lighting, the Neighborhood Prosecutor, and Building and Safety, it became clear that other concerns for our area were being ignored. Many apartment issues had been addressed and were being "worked on" although neglect and lawlessness were still very much apparent up and down the street. These issues ranged from crime to nuisance problems: blatant drug dealing, public loitering, drinking and urination, trash and litter, loud parties, speeding cars, fire works, motorized mini-bicycles and parking problems.

Our experience as a Neighborhood Watch had up till this time been watching our wonderful Council District coordinate the agencies that were needed to assist in making improvements on the apartment. We had not learned how to work together as a neighborhood watch and didn't really understand our role aside from this particular situation.

We invited Bill Murray to speak at our meeting. We asked him how the Neighborhood Watch program fits into the picture of community policing. We wanted to understand how we could maximize our efforts and grow into a strong neighborhood watch.

Bill informed the group of the structure of the Los Angeles Police Department. He described the basic car areas and the approximate number of policemen on duty at any time. Much of the time our police cars are "chasing the radio." Through the radio/computer they are dispatched to one emergency after another, leaving essentially no time for other police duties. We need to understand this overarching reality so we know why the police are not able to do the many things we want them to do. That's why they are not able to have much effect on the quality of life issues that plague many neighborhoods.

Each Basic Car Area is assigned a Senior Lead Officer. We learned that the Senior Lead Officer is the police officer who is given time to meet with community groups and learn our concerns. They may take our concerns to other police staff so they become aware of chronic situations that plague neighborhoods.

Our group learned how essential it is to be in regular communication with our Senior Lead Officer. Bill emphasized using his Community Policing website to heighten our awareness of police issues. When I went on the web site, I discovered an orderly presentation of all this vital information. The importance of the Senior Lead Officer was again highlighted.

Information is only important if it improves your ability to act effectively. We had an incident that proved the importance of understanding the way things work in no uncertain terms. Several of our Neighborhood Watch houses observed drug dealing at a chronic site in front of "the empty lot" on a Sunday morning. We thought we had a good chance to get a quick response from LAPD because of the day and time.

We coordinated our calls as we learned to do in our Neighborhood Watch meetings and the police arrived in time while the activities were still in progress. The policemen, without getting out of the car, simply told the loiterers to go away. The loiterers crossed the street and waited for the police to turn their car around and leave the area. The perpetrators returned to the site and picked up a backpack we observed them receive from a car that stopped by.

We were dumbfounded that the police had foiled a chance to make some arrests and chip away at the drug problems often observed at this site. We thought we had done our job as neighbors.

When the dust of disappointment settled, we looked at the material Bill introduced and were able to focus our concern on the apparent lack of communication between the officers on duty and our Senior Lead Officer. Certainly our Senior Lead knew of our continuous complaints of drug activities at the empty lot.

This understanding of "how it should have been" allowed us to be less angry and to feel instead empowered. We now had some choices as to what to do next.