Palmer to hold Neighborhood Watch meeting tonight

PALMER — Hoping to revive a moribund network of local Neighborhood Watch groups, the Palmer Police Department is holding a meeting at 7 p.m. today.

Sgt. Lance Ketterling said Neighborhood Watch is generally organized at the level of one street or one block. A subdivision-size group would be the biggest. How active they are, he said, can be affected greatly when just one particularly gung-ho neighbor moves out of the area.

“We don’t have really very many active groups right now. We have had them in the past, but their involvement kind of waxes and wanes,” Ketterling said. “At the moment it’s in a state of what I would consider decline.”

He said there’s a common misconception about Neighborhood Watch.

“It’s more than just sitting around looking for strange cars coming into the neighborhoods,” Ketterling said.

Neighborhood Watch groups network with their neighbors. Members get to know one another. They watch out for each other, and they let the police know what kind of trouble a particular area is facing.

“That’s one of the most important things is that the community can be a feedback to the police about what they see as a need,” Ketterling said. “We can’t fix it if we don’t know it’s broken.”

The types of issues Neighborhood Watch groups might look out for are burglaries, vehicle thefts and domestic violence. That last one might be kind of surprising. But neighbors are well placed to notice if domestic violence is occurring, mostly because they’re in earshot of the crime.

“A lot of domestic violence is heard before it’s seen,” Ketterling said.

Tonight’s meeting at the Palmer Train Depot will feature information on how to start a Neighborhood Watch group, literature from the national organization and a general discussion about what Neighborhood Watch entails.

Ketterling said the idea to try and breathe some life into Neighborhood Watch came from a meeting with his boss, Cmdr. Tom Remaley. They were talking about things the department wants to accomplish. Neighborhood Watch is high on the list.

In 2009, the department did a similar thing with local businesses. A rash of burglaries around that time had prompted a lot of interest in how to keep businesses safe and secure after hours.

That sort of morphed into the Palmer Business Education and Protection Plan, which, in turned helped spur talk of what else Palmer could do to become, as Ketterling put it, a “full-service” police department.

“There is some awareness that can be raised in the private home ownership side of this as well,” Ketterling said.

And though Neighborhood Watch has been around for years, revitalizing it locally was the idea PPD came up with as a good way to spread that kind of education.

“There are quite a few folks that don’t seem to want to bother us. What we want to get across is that it’s not a bother. It’s our job,” Ketterling said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.

IF YOU GO

What: Neighborhood Watch meeting with the Palmer Police Department

Where: Palmer Train Depot

When: 7 p.m., Tuesday, April 12