When asked to be our block’s Neighborhood Watch captain last year, my initial reaction was – no thanks! I had never attended a meeting. I’m the last to investigate when an ambulance or police car comes racing down our street.
I like my privacy and dislike nosy people. But two neighbors had taken their turn, and I was next in seniority in home ownership on the block. The deciding factor was that my family had experienced criminal-element-neighbor hell, and we never wanted to go through that again. I knew a close-knit neighborhood was a good thing, that there was strength in numbers.
At the training meeting, my husband and I learned a few things about our men and women in blue. The national average of police officers in cities larger than 200,000 is 2.5 per one thousand citizens.
In Colorado Springs we have 1.7 per one thousand. This is in a city that, area wise, is larger than St. Louis, larger than Boston. To reach the 2.5 average we would need 300 more officers. Response times have been going up; in 2007 they averaged well over 10 minutes, far short of the 8 minutes, 90% of the time, goal.
I planned on having our first meeting in spring, but when the economy nosedived, crime on our low-crime neighborhood skyrocketed.
First, the home across from ours was broken into one evening while the young couple, with their children, attended a Cub Scout meeting. We thought it might have been kids (we live near a middle school), so while we were shocked, we weren’t overly worried.
Then came some car vandalism, a few petty thefts – tools taken from unlocked trucks – but nothing serious and nothing we hadn’t seen once or twice in the last fifteen years. The recession is making people desperate, we told ourselves and each other, we need to be more careful, more mindful.
Then came a Friday morning when an armed intruder came to our block. Surprised by a neighbor who had seen him enter a home and followed him, the intruder pointed a gun at the neighbor’s face, screamed at him, ordered him on the floor.
From outside, his terrified wife called 911. The would-be robber fled empty-handed, no one was physically harmed, and the police arrived quickly, but not in time to apprehend him.
When the rest of us found out what had happened we were stunned. An armed, aggressive intruder, at 10 a.m., two hundred feet away from a middle school, with the majority of us (many of us have home offices) home?
Later, we learned three homes nearby had been robbed that day, by the same person, after he had knocked on the front door to see if anyone was home. The more we learned, the more panicked we became.
Email warnings were sent to friends and neighbors, we discussed having weapons close to our front doors and using them if we had to. A few days later we held an emergency Neighborhood Watch meeting.
Two officers came to talk to us. We heard what they’d been dealing with (nonstop mayhem since the economy tanked) and what we could do about it. They eased our frazzled nerves, helped us understand that we were not helpless or powerless. We got to know them.
We learned that one had been on the scene during a recent horrible accident five blocks away at a 7-Eleven. An eighteen-year-old woman, a college student visiting her family for spring break, burned to death after a horrific crash when a truck hit the gas pumps while she was pumping gas. This officer had to face the young woman’s grieving mother on the scene.
The next week, his work took him to a home where he discovered an 88-year-old woman who had died peacefully in her sleep. With the Pittsburgh shootings fresh in all our minds, it seemed as if horror and danger surrounded us.
But in the room full of neighbors, in the company of these officers, I felt comfort in one truth. We are all affected, and we are all in this together. We could work to make things better.
A strong police force is essential. We need to value our officers, not with just lip service, but with compensation. These are men and women who will be there at the most terrible and stressful times of our lives.
Hard times are here. Crime has been increasing and TABOR has created a situation where it will be more difficult for city budgets than for the economy to recover from this recession. Participating in a Neighborhood Watch is a very good start, but it’s not enough.
In April, I learned the 2009 two percent budget cut in Colorado Springs’ police department means police aren’t able to respond to less serious crimes at all, such as vandalism and burglaries not in progress.
An average of 2,000 to 2,500 911 calls go unanswered every month because there is not enough phone support. Eleven vacant sworn positions and seven civilian positions have been eliminated.
With everything there is a tipping point, when things start changing markedly, for better or worse. We are currently at a ‘saturation point’ with our police force and are leading the tipping point in the worst possible direction.
It’s time to pick up the phone, write a letter to your representatives, so something. We can’t let the thin blue line get any thinner.
Sandra Knauf (sandra@sandraknauf.com) lives in Colorado Springs and publishes the zine “Greenwoman.” EDITOR’S NOTE: This is an online-only column and has not been edited.
