Sequim Police Department’s leaders look to reenergize the City of Sequim’s dormant Neighborhood Watch program.
Back in 2007, Sequim employed a full-time crime prevention officer but citywide cutbacks led the position to stop along with coordinating programming in 2010, said Police Chief Sheri Crain.
Leaders’ new plan, Crain said, is to reach out to 16 neighborhoods that already formed Neighborhood Watches and reestablish connections.
“We don’t want to bite off more than we can chew,” she said. “We want to know if we can do it.”
Part of the Neighborhood Watch program includes the police providing information on improving home security, sharing procedures for reporting crime, and more.
“We have the capacity to re-engage and reinvigorate the program now,” Crain said.
“A vast majority of our neighborhoods are low crime and there are no crime-ridden areas. Sequim is pretty dog-gone safe but the more we can do with prevention, the better.”
As the first step to re-establishing the program, Crain, Det. Sgt. Darrell Nelson, who now oversees the Neighborhood Watch program, and volunteers with the Sequim Police Department’s Volunteers in Police Service, met with several neighborhood block captains and citizens on March 29 in the Sequim Transit Center.
After the 2010 cutbacks, Nelson said they’ve had a passive response to Neighborhood Watches.
“The problem with the passive approach is that we don’t have consistent contact and some neighborhoods become passive (in crime prevention),” Crain said.
“This is our opportunity to make the relationship more productive.”
Paul Muncey, Volunteers in Police Service coordinator, said despite the drop-off in city support, about 10 of 16 Neighborhood Watches were still active but many of the block captains had moved away in that span so volunteers have been reconnecting with those areas.
“Block Watch held together when we didn’t have the means to support it,” Nelson said.
Now the city is looking for partnerships and volunteers to keep the program going while bridging it with other programs like the Community Emergency Response Team’s training and Map Your Neighborhood through other agencies.
“As we move into the future, we want to try to wrap it under one umbrella and help facilitate it,” Nelson said. “Ultimately, it’s about making the community safer.”
Muncey said literature on Neighborhood Watch is on order but mapping a neighborhood falls to the residents to carry out.
“We’re trying to communicate that we’re here,” Crain said. “We all have an obligation to know what’s going on in our community.”
Going forward, options still remain for the police department to increase the Neighborhood Watch program, Nelson said, including assigning one officer to have ongoing discussions with a neighborhood.
Crain said Lisa Hopper, code compliance officer, has shifted to run under the police department in the past year and she’ll look to do more crime prevention work, too. Sequim also has about 30 volunteers in the police department working in varying capacities including a handful of dedicated officers to the Neighborhood Watch program.
For more information about Neighborhood Watch in the City of Sequim, call 683-7227 for Det. Sgt. Darrell Nelson or Paul Muncey, VIPS program coordinator.
Reach Matthew Nash at mnash@sequimgazette.com.
