After a challenging period of waning resident interest and budget-necessitated changes within the Hollywood Police Department, police officials said the City’s Crime Watch program is well on its way to becoming more effective than ever before.
Hollywood Crime Watch currently boasts 1,700 active members and since the beginning of the year has gained 170 new members. Police Chief Chadwick Wagner said community interest in Crime Watch is growing, as are opportunities for citizen involvement.
“The program now is more vibrant and more active, and on its way to being better than it’s ever been,” he said.
Crime Watch organizations are known for their dedication to reducing local crime through neighborhood awareness and effective communication between citizen groups and police departments. But some Hollywood residents have criticized their Crime Watch program for not living up to its potential in recent years.
Crime Watch was strong when it started in Hollywood back in the 1970s, Wagner said. “It was a great program. But over the years, it had trouble sustaining the enthusiasm of its citizens.”
In the ’80s, Crime Watch merged with the Police Department’s Crime Prevention Unit and the program lost its coordinator. In the late ’90s, the department’s civilian public information officers were replaced with sworn police personnel, and the Crime Watch program “was diluted even more,” Wagner said.
When the economy was thriving, crime was low – as was residents’ interest in participation in Crime Watch. All that changed in recent years.
Unemployment rose, along with the crime rate – particularly home burglaries. City budget crunches forced a reduction in the number of police command staff personnel from 15 to seven, and several police divisions started operating under the same umbrella, with the Crime Prevention Unit running Crime Watch.
“There was no one really to oversee just the Crime Watch program,” Wagner said.
With rising crime and a challenging economy forcing people to stay longer in the same house sparking a renewed citizen interest in neighborhood safety, Mayor Peter Bober and Wagner last year started discussing ways to improve the Crime Watch program. A part-time coordinator was hired in April but had to resign for personal reasons in late August. The City is in the process of hiring a replacement.
Maj. Joe Healey, who heads the Special Operations Section and has an extensive background in community policing and street narcotics, oversees the program. There are Crime Watch organizations in 20 neighborhoods, each of which has its own police officer to identify and address problems, as well as block captains and a Citizens’ Crime Watch Advisory Board member appointed by city commissioners.
Hollywood Lakes resident Jeff Barrett, an advisory board member for six years until July 2010, said active community participation in the Crime Watch program has met with resistance from the Police Department and “the police also want control over communications and activity.”
But Wagner said all parties – residents, city officials and police personnel alike – are “on the same page” when it comes to Crime Watch, and citizen involvement is key to the program’s success.
“It makes it easier for the officers. No matter what’s happening, there’s going to be other eyes out there,” Wagner said, adding that the Police Department “can never get enough calls” from concerned residents.
He cites as one example of active citizen involvement the Crime Watch Mobile Patrol, which has logged more than 1,400 hours patrolling local neighborhoods since January.
“When we tried to do this in the ’90s, nobody wanted to do it. So it’s working out great now,” Wagner said. “We encourage everybody to join.”
“They are a tremendous resource and a tremendous help,” Healey said, adding that civilian mobile patrollers often attend police lineup. “They see these guys all the time. They’re part of the team.”
This month, the Mobile Patrol program will further benefit from the addition of 14 marked vehicles earmarked for patrollers’ use.
Another improvement to the Crime Watch program is the upcoming launch of a code enforcement pilot program in which civilian volunteers will be trained to identify code violations and issue courtesy warning violation notices. Code enforcement officers, whose division was placed under the Police Department’s Special Operations Section earlier this year, will then follow up and issue code violations as needed.
Healey called code compliance “one of the most visible, pressing issues in the city” – and one that’s currently addressed by a staff of 12 code officers, compared with 19 officers in 2007.
Healey stressed that all programs are first run by neighborhood leaders. “We want to continue to grow the Crime Watch program, get more buy-in from the community,” he said. “We’re more transparent than we’ve ever been, and in order for us to be successful, we need the community involved more than ever.”
As for any criticism of a lack of communication between the Police Department and Crime Watch, Wagner recently signed off on a new policy to text or e-mail all BOLO (Be On the Look-Out) alerts to interested members. Residents also can sign up for membership in Crime Watch USA (www.crimewatchusa.org) for access to instant police communications.
The community is already starting to pull together to address neighborhood concerns, Wagner said. “The involvement now is better than I’ve ever seen it.”
Interested Hollywood residents can sign up for Crime Watch Mobile Patrol or civilian code enforcement training, or attend the Citizens Police Academy. For more information, visit www.hollywoodpolice.org.
