imported post
yale wrote:
How about, instead of walking the streets with slung rifles, you try a less agressive approach first.
Have your group of residents find a meeting place Then print up and distribute fliers to the neighborhood discussing the recent uptick in crime and your desire to organise a Neighborhood Watch. Contact you local Law Enforcement Agency and ask them to send a representitive to your meeting to address resident concerns.
Address lighting, crime cameras and the possibility of getting extra police patrols in your area.
Contact the local media, newspapers and Television, to report on the crime problem and your attempts to organise against it.
Get your Neghborhood Watch rolling and have regular meetings with residents and Law Enforcement to keep them from letting down their guard.
IF you want to patrol your streets, do so in a way that won't cause more problems than you want to cure. Pistols for self defense may be resonable but long guns may be a bit too much. A few of the popular FRS radios distributed to block captians can give you a cheap means of communications as you observe your neighborhood. Keep in mind that just because you and a few friends mean well and want to "patrol" to combat the crime in your neighborhood you don't have anymore authority or power than any of the other residents there.
Crime cameras? You mean invasion-of-privacy cameras? There is no need for someone to be watching everything going on everywhere all the time. Ignoring the privacy concerns, they just don't help anything. Look at how many cameras there are in the UK and their crime rate is through the roof too. Now, if those cameras had remote controlled guns on them, so the person watching could shoot a perp, then that'd be neato hehehe. (pro tip: no one is really watching, it's just recording, for after-the-fact evidence, so again, they don't stop crime anymore than laws stop crime).
And what's wrong with long guns? They're superior to handguns in accuracy, distance, and killing power. I'd want long guns too, possibly shotguns (depending on the layout etc).
You're right, they don't have any more authority or power than any other resident there, but by carrying, they have more -ability- to protect themselves and their neighbors. Apparently there's enough crime that whatever police presence there is, isn't enough to deter criminals.
If we HAD more armed citizens going around knocking skulls on criminals etc that like to attack unarmed targets, there'd be a sharp decline in those types of people.
P.S. Going back to the cameras, there were some installed under... ugh, old and bad memory, somewhere in bossier/shreveport, I forget. But I remember reading that 1year after the overpriced camera system had been installed (at taxpayer expense of course!) they had helped stop exactly -zero- crime.