By now, you are probably familiar with the “Florida situation.” A guy named Zimmerman calls police, identifies himself as a neighborhood watch member, runs after suspect and next thing we know, suspect is shot dead and police let Zimmerman go. Call it what you want, but one thing is for sure: very bad publicity for Police, very bad publicity for neighborhood watch programs.
Houston Public Affairs is definitely aware of what has now become a nationwide case study and one thing has become clear: how does Houston keep something like that from happening here? Houston established a service before all this happend, called V.I.P.- Volunteer Initiatives Program. Within that program is a citizen patrol program cleverly called Citizens On Patrol (C.O.P.). On their site, it reads:
“.. the Citizen Patrol program was established in an effort to bring the citizens and the police department together for a common goal, and that is to improve the quality of life by eliminating crime.”
This program has now become the liability that Houston needs to distance itself from in case any of those citizen patrollers go rogue. So the Chief of Police does his thing and the lawyers do theirs and bake themselves a new citizen patrol pie and decided to debut it today with a mandatory meeting for all HPD officers who run the VIP program and even invited representatives from the participating neighborhoods. Mandell Place was one of them.
After the obligatory common sense things were discussed, like, “don’t carry a weapon on you,” and “don’t pursue potential suspects,” the bomb slyly gets dropped in passing- “You should not be walking.”
One neighborhood representative catches this and after clarifying that HPD insinuates that when patrolling you cannot actually be walking, as in one foot in front of the other, the room takes a collective gasp and chaos ensues. The officer facilitating the meeting, Officer Byrd, tries repeatedly to get the meeting back on track, but representative after representative basically can’t believe that walking the neighborhood is no longer permitted. For the rest of the meeting all you could pretty much hear over and over among the audience is something to the effect of, “You just killed our neighborhood citizen patrol program.”
So here’s the logic: If there is a barrier between a potential suspect and the patroller, such as the inside of a car, the chances of pulling a Zimmerman becomes reduced. However, let’s chalk it off as safety for the patroller, since they can quickly zip away in their automobile should a suspect they identify become beligerent. It’s a win, win situation, right? Not really.
The basic concept of the citizen patrol program was originally billed as the following to Mandell Place-
People take strolls in their neighborhood anyways. So why not take a course on neighborhood safety so that you perform double duty, enjoying a nice walk while also being the eyes and ears of your community. People who walk regularly know what normal looks like because they usually take the same route. They can discern faster than any policeman whether something is off kilter along that route. It also gives people incentive to take those walks, and as more people do it, it adds one more way to facilitate the secure pedestrian-like environment Montrose has been striving for all this time.
We currently have 11 volunteers in Mandell that signed up and got the training, figuring why not: “I walk regularly anyways, why not make it beneficial for my neighbors while I do it?”
Better yet, once our volunteers log in 180 hours combined, Mandell Place gets placcards placed throughout the neighborhood notifying passersby and future potential residents that we have an active community that watches out for each other.
But now, those 11 volunteers can no longer use their walks to patrol the neighborhood. In fact, if they are caught with thier patrol ID, they will be penalized. Instead, they need to get in their car, gas it up and drive around instead, up and down our streets. How many odd things can you notice while driving vs. walking?
How many of us would even want to spend x number of hours doing that per week? Did I mention you need to place a sign on your car, too?
The hours spent walking by our volunteers are disqualified even though they will be serving the same purpose they have done before any of this happened.
Houston, you did it. You found a way to distance yourself from the liability.
Oh and by the way, “You just killed our citizen patrol program.”
