I would like to share our Neighbourhood Watch Group’ s experience of how the simple act of face to face communication within the group has had a positive impact on solving problems with anti-social behaviour.
For many years our community has suffered with rowdy, drunken, late night anti-social behaviour (ASB) from youths gathering in a public open space surrounded by our residential housing.
We have, with limited success, conventionally tackled this by liaising with local Police Community Support Officers (PSCO’s), lobbying Parish councillors, telephoning 101 together with all other conventional methods of dealing with this type of problem.
However, one summer a couple of years back, after some particularly bad periods of ASB, we organised a casual meeting to take place in the park in question. We also took the opportunity to leaflet drop around another fifty or so other houses in the surrounding area to advise those residents that if they too suffered from ASB, a meeting to discuss tackling the problem was taking place.
We further took the opportunity to invite local PSCO’s, Parish councillors and indeed any other officials that we could think of that could offer help and advice in tackling ASB.
To our delight, all our Neighbourhood Watch members attended, together with a number of invited officials plus thirty or so other local residents (all of whom are now signed up to our group)
During our meeting a number of solutions were discussed and solid plans were made to create a Neighbourhood Action Group (NAG) to meet regularly and monitor the situation more closely. Since that time PSCO patrols have increased and our neighbourhood watch group numbers over sixty all of whom are vigilant and report ASB promptly.
I am convinced that the simple act of residents and officials meeting face to face to focus our problems has gone a long way to foster a community spirit, helped us all pull together and take actions that have helped reduce the instances of ASB.
Colin,
Local resident and Neighbourhood Watch Group co-ordinator
