FREE ESSAY ON NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH

NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH

The Neighborhood Watch:
One of the most effective crime prevention tools being utilized today is the Neighborhood
Watch. The Neighborhood Watch was designed to help strengthen the relationships between
neighbors and in the process build community wide crime prevention. Law enforcement
officials have for years relied on the community to assist in apprehending criminals
after the crime has been committed. With a Neighborhood Watch, this assistance is
proactive instead of reactive, meaning that the watch can stop the crime before it
occurs. 
A Neighborhood Watch can be formed around any geographical unit: a block, apartment,
public housing complex or neighborhood. A watch group serves as an extra set of eyes and
ears for reporting crime and helping neighbors. The effectiveness of a Neighborhood Watch
is depends on its members. The Neighborhood Watch serves as a springboard for efforts
that address community concerns such as recreation for youth, child care, and affordable
housing. A Neighborhood Watch can easily be set up, first contact your neighbors, then
then contact your local law enforcement agency and check about setting up a Neighborhood
Watch meeting. In order for a group to be certified as a neighborhood watch, most
agencies require a minimum of two initial meetings. After the two initial meetings, it is
up to each neighborhood to elect a captain for the Neighborhood Watch. Once this is done,
the captain will receive signs that will announce to would be criminals that the
neighborhood is on the watch. (National Crime Prevention)
There are some tips that are important to keep in mind, which help the Neighborhood watch
succeed. First, organize regular meetings that focus on current issues such as drug
abuse, crime in schools, recreational activities for young people, and neighborhood
problems. Second organize community patrols to walk around streets or apartment complexes
and report suspicious activity to police. People in cars with cellular phones or CB
radios can also patrol. Also, adopt a park or street in the neighborhood. Pick up litter,
repair broken equipment, paint over graffiti, to make the neighborhood look nicer. If
your resources will allow, publish a newsletter that gives prevention tips and local
crime news, recognizes residents of all ages who have made a difference, and highlights
community events. Plan neighborhood social events such as block parties, picnics, and
volleyball or softball games. (Crime Prevention)
Some of the things that a Neighborhood Watch should be looking for are, someone screaming
or shouting for help, someone looking into windows and parked cars, unusual noises,
property taken out of closed businesses or houses where no one is at home, cars, vans, or
trucks moving slowly with no apparent destination, or without lights, anyone being forced
into a vehicle, strangers sitting in a car or stopping to talk to a child, and abandoned
cars. 
This program falls under the neighborhood/ community category, obviously because a
Neighborhood Watch is designed to help the neighborhood. Creating the Neighborhood Watch
fits into the routine activities theory, because taking away the element known as lack of
supervision will prevent crime. Also, the Neighborhood Watch could fit into the social
disorganization theory, because, social disorganization talks about how the people in the
community do not know each other very well, and the union of the community which occurs
with the neighborhood watch would cause more people to know each other and pay more
attention to what's going on in the community.
Schools:
School-based prevention programs include interventions to prevent a variety of forms of
problem behavior, including theft, violence, illegal acts of aggression, alcohol or other
drug use; rebellious behavior, anti-social behavior, aggressive behavior, defiance of
authority, and disrespect for others. These different forms of delinquent behavior are
highly correlated and share common causes. Many of the programs were not specifically
designed to prevent the problem behaviors, but instead to affect presumed causal factors
such as school drop-out, truancy, or other correlates which are expected to increase
protection against or decrease risk towards engaging in problem behaviors at some later
date. This focus on non-crime program outcomes is effective because the young ages of
many of the students. Positive program effects on reading skills for six-year-old's may
be as important in terms of later crime prevented as reducing marijuana use for
sixteen-year-old's. Many prevention researchers and practitioners also assume a link
between less serious problem behaviors and later more serious crime. The characteristics
of conduct problems are so highly related to delinquent behavior they may even be
considered a starting point for it. Studies of school-based prevention often measure
these characteristics in addition to actual delinquent behavior because the students are
too young to have initiated delinquent behavior, so these students are learning this
behavior from somewhere. Conduct problem behavior includes a variety of behaviors:
defiance, disrespect, rebelliousness, hitting, stealing, lying, fighting, talking back to
persons in authority, etc. Low self control is a disposition to behave impulsively, and
aggression involves committing acts of hostility and violating the rights of others.
School-wide efforts to redefine norms for behavior and signal appropriate behavior
through the use of rules. These include activities such as newsletters, posters, and/or
ceremonies during which students declare their intention to remain drug-free, and
displaying symbols of appropriate behavior. Some well-known interventions in this
category are red ribbon week sponsored through the Department of Education's Safe and
Drug-Free Schools and Communities program and school-wide campaigns against bullying. The
category also includes efforts to establish or clarify school rules or discipline codes
and mechanisms for the enforcement of school rules. 
Some of these intervention programs provide instruction to students to teach them factual
information, increase their awareness of social influences to engage in misbehavior,
expand their repertoires for recognizing and appropriately responding to risky or
potentially harmful situation, and improve their moral character. Well-known examples
include Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E.), Law-related Education (L.R.E.), and
Gang Resistance Education and Training (G.R.E.A.T.). (Gottfredson) 
Another method used by schools is behavior modification thinking, this involves
strategies focusing directly on changing behaviors and involves tracking specific
behaviors over time, behavioral goals, and uses feedback or positive or negative
reinforcement to change behavior. These strategies rely on reinforcers external to the
student to shape student behavior. Larger effects on behavior might be obtained by
teaching students to modify their own behavior using a range of cognitive strategies
research has found lacking in delinquent youth. Efforts to teach students thinking
strategies involve modeling or demonstrating behaviors and providing rehearsal and
coaching in the display of new skills. Students are taught, for example, to recognize the
physiological cues experienced in risky situations. They rehearse this skill and practice
stopping rather than acting impulsively in such situations. Students are taught and
rehearsed in suggesting alternative activities when friends propose engaging in a risky
activity. And they are taught to use prompts or cues to remember to engage in behavior. 
School prevention programs falls under the area of school programs. These types of
programs can be placed in the cognitive theories, and the learning theories, because it
teaches children the proper way to act toward criminal situations that may arise through
out life. 
I chose to look at these two types of crime prevention programs because I think that they
are very important in the future of crime prevention. Neighborhood watches are valuable
to help stop a crime in progress, where as the school programs prevent crimes from
happening by teaching children the right ways to act.
Bibliography
1. Crime Prevention Mathis, Wayne LT.
2. Crime Prevention Services Arkansas Crime Info Center
3. National Crime Prevention Council 
4. School Based Crime Prevention Gottfredson, Denise