Neighbourhood Watch - do you use it and how?

NeighbourhoodWatch

Hi Tiddlywinks,

We used to rely on people reporting breaches of the guidelines to us. We (NHWN) cover the whole of England and Wales, so we can't 'police' the operation of every single individual Neighbourhood Watch scheme! Also, as a community-led, community-run movement it's not appropriate for a national body like us to micro-manage every street level scheme. However, there are Neighbourhood Watch Associations that operate at force area or County level and they would normally handle any breaches of the guidelines - it would only be escalated to us if the Association was unable to deal with it for any reason.

We are putting in place a framework for measuring the performance of the Associations and helping to support them if perhaps they don't quite measure up as they should - in the spirit of helping, not playing the blame game. They will be measured every year to see how they are doing and what progress they are making if needed, and we will be helping them along the way on an almost-daily basis where improvements are needed.

The responsibility for ensuring that individual, street-level schemes meet our guidelines lies with the Associations, although we will always help and support wherever possible. As I'm sure you can understand, too much 'top down' intervention from national directly to street level schemes does not go down well and is only necessary when a coordinator or member is behaving in a totally unacceptable way, which is thankfully rare.

We are also doing a lot of work behind the scenes on measuring the effectiveness of Neighbourhood Watch. As long as members/coordinators aren't doing anything actively bad we are happy for them to continue as schemes, but of course we want to help them be as effective as possible!

System

We have the neighbourhood watch signs around here but i have never met anyone who is in charge of it. Tbh i thought those signs were just put up as a deterrent. If there is an active neighbourhood vigilante team then they are pretty useless! Someone nicked our garden gnome without anyone seeing anything

Primrose

If I had a garden gnome I would probably be quite grateful if somebody pinched it :rotfl:

NNW Lamp post signs are usually put up by street coordinators but they move house or give up and often don't arrange for anybody to deputise for them so street schemes regularly lapse. I have about 90 street coordinators linked into me by email as an Area Coordinator and try to encourage them all to have deputies so schemes keep going. But sadly you often find that the people who grumble the most about the absence of any particular voluntary service are usually the same people who are never prepared to do anything themselves.

Incidentally Neighbourhood Watch members are not vigilantes. What they should be doing though, is keeping a general eye out for anything suspicious in their neighbourhood and where necessary, reporting it to the police, and also hopefully keeping a watchful eye on their neighbours. 'properties when they're unoccupied or on holiday, as well as those who are elderly and living alone. .