(Reposted from CityGroups task blog)
SUMMARY: What are Block Watch Captains? Why do they matter? How is CityGroups helping them?
In Seattle, we are helping Block Watch Captains in the West Seattle neighborhood to find each other.
You have maybe seen these signs before:
Neighborhood Watch Signs in West Seattle (photos by Chach Sikes)
Prior to my time as a fellow with Code for America, I had wondered what was up with these signs. Now I know. The are put up by neighbors, often home-owners, who are participating in a relationship with the local Police department (in this case, Seattle). The signs help deter crime. And somewhere behind that sign is a Block Watch Captain.
What is a Block Watch Captain?
This is not a text-book definition, but my own interpretation of a Block Watch Captain after interviewing 5-10 Block Watch Captains, and personally, as a citizen and as someone who wants to help people address issues of safety. Here is the official description, from the Seattle Police Department.
How might you meet a Block Watch Captain?
If you move to a neighborhood, sometimes the Block Watch Captain will find you. Some Block Watch Captains view renters as transient, by the way, but there are sometimes Block Watch Captains in apartment buildings.
My own personal experience: I have a sign like those shown above in my own neighborhood in Berkeley. I want to see if there's a real human behind the sign, but I'm not going to call the Police department just to find out. That's tax money that I don't want to waste just to satisfy my own curiosity. Also, I live in an apartment building. No one in my life has ever reached out to me, though maybe I've gotten something stuffed in a mailbox. When I lived in Minneapolis, I saw a sign for our neighborhood Corn feed, which was our equivalent of National Night Out.
At the Seattle Iconathon, Shanna Christie, webmaster of the Seattle Police Department, made this sketch of a possible improvement to these neighborhood signs. A QR code. Perhaps we can auto generate a QR code for the Block Watch Captain directory, so that if you live in a neighborhood that has a Block Watch Captain in the directory, you can actually find out who to talk to without having to make a phone call - simply by adding a sticker to the existing sign.
Block Watch Captains are volunteers, and are independent from the Police, though they often work with Crime Prevention Coordinators. Crime Prevention Coordinators in Seattle have played a very important role in teaching Block Watch Captains about ways to make neighborhoods safer - like trimming sketchy bushes, or reporting street lights that are out.
Things I have learned through interviewing Block Watch Captains and community police officers:
Block Watch Captains are volunteers and they are also people who act as the "Mayor" of the Block. They often help facilitate communication among neighbors. In some neighborhoods, they are trained to help their neighbors know how to shut off gas in the event of an earthquake. Block Watch Captains also maintain lists of contact information for elderly people, and might call up their children who live somewhere else. Block Watch Captains often plan National Night Out Block Parties that help neighbors get to know each other. Block Captains are the go-to people in city-wide emergencies, and are the some of the people that the Police talk to when there are serious problems going on.
Some Block Watch Captains want to address persistent and annoying issues like illegal dumping, people selling drugs on the street to kids, or people tagging other people's houses. There is some relationship to property taxes, where the presence of a Neighborhood Watch increases the value of the homes. Property values tend to go up when a neighborhood is safer. (This may be obvious to homeowners, but as a renter, this is kind of new to me.)
Block Watch Captains tend to focus mainly on issues related to crime, but some Block Watch Captains are interested in Emergency Preparedness, Crime Prevention, Neighborhood Cleanups.
Not every block has a Block Watch Captain. I have heard many times that neighbors knowing each other is the best way to be safe in your own neighborhood. If you want a safer neighborhood, planning a Block Party or a big potluck dinner are two really good ways to go.
What CityGroups is doing
You might be surprised to know that in Seattle, there used to be an up-to-date list of the 4,000 people in the communities behind those Neighborhood Watch signs, but once we got the Internet, the old ways of keeping track were never fully modernized. So now there are lots of out-dated phone numbers.
Because of budget issues, it is harder and harder for city residents to find out who, in their own neighborhood, might be behind these signs. A new Block Watch Captain might expect to be able to connect with other Block Watch Captains through the Internet.
Meanwhile, Block Watch Organizers in West Seattle and other neighborhoods throughout Seattle have started self-organizing to find each other. We have worked with the West Seattle Block Watch Captain Network, and have created a special version of CityGroups that allows for Block Watch Captains in Seattle to build a public directory, with mapping features, that can be kept up-to-date. The data will be exported and also hosted in the Socrata social data service, which Seattle uses for their data.seattle.gov platform (which is how they publicize all of the cities 911 emergency calls.)
Using the CityGroups platform, we are helping Block Watch Captains in Seattle find each other, by helping them share basic contact information with one another. They can draw the boundaries of the community in their "Block Watch" (usually about 25 homes.) This helps them find other Block Watch Captains - which is handy because if there are big storms, rapists on the loose, robberies, murders, earthquakes, it's better to find the people two blocks away that you know you could talk to.
This is a community-hosted, moderated & maintained project. The code is all 'open source' (Drupal) and this project is one example of a 'community mapping project' for very small volunteer-run community groups that do important work in our neighborhoods.
We'll be mapping Block Watch Captains in West Seattle this Fall starting September 15. If you know any Block Watch Captains in Seattle, please tell them to get on the map. If this goes well, we hope to share what we learn with other neighborhoods in Seattle so that everyone can find out what's going on in their own Neighborhood.