Neighborhood Watch & Neighborhood Councils
Why Neighborhood Watch should be the first priority for Neighborhood Councils

by Andrew Garsten

I write this article with a certain sense of irony.

Just recently I was critical of the local police captain because of a manipulative meeting where he distilled all of the varied problems in the community to two priority items that his station would focus on. In the end, one of the two items was a call on the community to increase local Neighborhood Watch participation by 30%, something that only the community can accomplish.

Question: When is a job only half a job?

Answer: When the job calls for accomplishing 100% of two things, but with accountability for only one.

My discussion below about Neighborhood Watch is not for our police captain. Yes, it is for public safety, but more importantly, it is for our society at large, our local community, our shared quality of life, and our political system that now touches the ground with Neighborhood Councils.

It is about farming for the future while having real, achievable impact almost immediately.

What's On Your Agenda?

I ran for my neighborhood council district representative position first on my reputation as an active community member, secondly representing my local district and the community based organizations that I am a member of, and finally my pet project, our local elementary school - Elysian Heights. During the weeks following the elections for the Greater Echo Park Elysian Neighborhood Council (GEPENC), people in the community would often ask me what my agenda was going to be. I actually spent a few cycles trying to think about this.

As I pondered the myriad of issues, both big and small that face our community, I tried to identify a positive agenda that would serve the community at large, and would be something that could be achieved with limited human and capital resources. The culmination of my thought process was in some ways, the most boring and uncreative thing one could come up with; "Take what we have been doing successfully in parts of our community, and bring these things deeper into our community."

Things like Neighborhood Watch, our Echo Park Security Association (with it's low cost private patrol service), graffiti paint outs, and tree plantings. Parts of our community have been impacted in an almost revolutionary way by these activities over the last 15 years. But my guess is that with-in the boundaries of GEPENC, perhaps only 30% of the population has been served.

The best way for us to continue the trend of quality of life improvement, is to take these community driven services and bring them further into our community, pushing the edges of un-served areas to the very borders of our Neighborhood Council, and then perhaps beyond.

The Natural State of Affairs is Chaos

To paraphrase a mentor of mine, "The City of Los Angeles is by nature in a state of chaos, open to bodies of organized power to create momentum where there is no movement - just entropy. Sometimes movement is in a good direction, and sometimes bad."

Our neighborhoods - the very streets that we live on - are, without any exerted force, in a state of chaos. When we don't know our neighbors, then we are detached from our neighborhood. We make the assumption that whatever takes place, good or bad, is someone else's responsibility. And if no organized body is exerting it's will, the activities seem to be, and often are, random and bad. We curse the politicians and the police, and barricade ourselves in our homes.

The bottom line is that community does not exist in these situations.

The Needs of Neighborhood Councils

Neighborhood councils, like any organization, have two classes of needs: a system of input and output, and the development of future leaders.

Without the input and output system, a Neighborhood Council does not know what the consensus issues are. It has no way to accurately define its agenda. It has no way of informing the community of it's actions. And it has no way of mobilizing the community to be partners in seeing it's actions implemented.

Without developing future leaders, a Neighborhood Council, no matter how big an area it represents, will ultimately run through the pool of people who by nature or circumstances external to the Neighborhood Council, see themselves as potential community leaders. As was stated above, the result is a limited pool of resources, ideas, and energy, to tackle the daily and long term issues that every community faces.

Building Community and Activism from Chaos

We might define "community" as "a unity based on what we have in common." When neighbors who live in the world of random and bad events get together, they find that they share the perception and impact of these events. They become a "community" at the very smallest level possible.

Once Community is established, community bonding occurs, that is, people get to know each other, and of course it becomes apparent that the level of common interests is usually much deeper than the surface random and bad events. There are hopes and dreams, families and schools, pets and food, and all kinds of things that people share when they live in the same neighborhoods as each other.

Leadership and is born, because some people will lead to take action and others will follow. And organization is born - the method of collecting and distributing information. And the focus of the leadership and organization is initially the same basic things that we have been doing successfully in parts of our community. Things like our Echo Park Security Association, graffiti paint outs, and tree plantings.

Recommendation:

Neighborhood Councils should make the growth of Neighborhood Watch cells throughout their boundaries a primary goal. In fact, once certified, Neighborhood Watch cell development should be the ongoing mode of "outreach," since this is outreach on steroids. Not only are you organizing people to participate, you are directly creating the means for them to improve the quality of their lives.

Neighborhood Watch Benefits:

	Create small blocks of community
	Create basic organizations that can collect input on issues common to members and can disseminate information back to members
	Create the means to mobilize people to take action regarding basic quality of life issues
	Breed new community leaders

Motion:

I hereby make a motion that this Neighborhood Council create a standing sub-committee called the Neighborhood Watch Development Committee. The Committee will consist of no less than 5 members, one from each district, and will be charged with working with LAPD to promote and organize Neighborhood Watch Cells throughout the Neighborhood Council boundaries for the purpose of improving quality of life, creating mechanisms for issue input for and agenda output from the NC, and the development of future community leadership.

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A note from Andrew:

Hello,

I wrote the following specifically for my neighborhood council, but I feel that the ideas may apply across other areas in the city of Los Angeles, so I am sending this off to many destinations to hopefully inspire thought, maybe debate, and hopefully some action.

I encourage you to forward to anyone you think might be interested, and to freely publish (and modify appropriately) as long as you let me know.

Andrew Garsten
GEPENC District Representative
andrew.garsten@sbcglobal.net
323 / 664-7608

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Andrew Garsten

andrew.garsten@sbcglobal.net

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EDITOR'S NOTE: Other works by Andrew Garsten, a frequent contributor to LA Community Policing who resides in Echo Park, can be found through the following LACP link:

Andrew Garsten
Echoing about community involvement