Neighborhood Watch

In the last newsletter we mentioned that the Board of Directors of The Sanctuary Club was considering initiating a Neighborhood Watch for The Sanctuary as a priority.

As a result of participating in a special meeting on August 25th, at which a comprehensive Neighborhood Watch presentation was conducted, the Board unanimously voted to initiate the program.

The following is a brief of what Neighborhood Watch is all about.

Across the nation crime is of concern to citizens everywhere.

Increasingly, citizens and law enforcement professionals realize that neither one can eradicate crime working separately, however neighbors working cooperatively with law enforcement, can have a positive effect.

Home burglaries, in particular, can be minimized when community residents take steps to make their homes less attractive and vulnerable to burglars.

Burglary, the unlawful entry of a structure to commit a felony or theft, is generally considered a crime against property. It has, however, a high potential for death or injury to the victim who comes into surprise contact with the intruder.

Through the well-recognized concept of Neighborhood Watch, a community-based program supported by the National Sheriffs’ Association since 1972, residents of thousands of communities across the nation have discovered that they can make a difference in preventing crime.

Since its establishment, Neighborhood Watch has developed thousands of such local residential crime prevention programs in which individual citizens work to:
1) Make their own homes and families less inviting targets for crime.
2) Cooperate with law enforcement through block and neighborhood groups to control crime throughout the community.

The next step for us is to have a meeting of all the residents in The Sanctuary at which a Neighborhood Watch presentation will be made by the City of Hoover Police Department Crime Prevention Unit, after which implementation of the program will begin. We are now looking at late-September to early-October as the date for the meeting.

We will announce the meeting schedule, including time,date, and place as the details are made available to us on “The Sanctuary Club blogspot.”