Neighborhood Safety

By Forrest Williams

Our neighborhoods deserve to be safe and healthy. We need to take a comprehensive and proactive approach to preventing crime, making our schools safe, and keeping our neighborhoods beautiful. This means more police on the beat, swift responses to crime, and more community involvement. Our goals should include working with police, schools, neighbors, and the City to create a detailed approach to maintaining safe neighborhoods.

1. Push for more police on the beat, with an emphasis on community policing. San Jose may be the safest major city in the nation, but when it comes to our families, we can never be too safe. We need to examine the needs of our neighborhoods for police services on an area-by-area basis. We also should establish police storefronts in our neighborhoods. Storefronts have been used effectively in other cities to help improve community policing and neighborhood safety. We can also use them as central locations for other crime prevention activites.

2. Expand the Safe Schools Campus Initiative. In the wake of last year's tragedies in Colorado and Georgia, it has become increasingly important to take a proactive approach to school safety. The City's Safe School Campus Initiative brings parents, teachers, students, and police officers together to ensure safety on school campuses. This pilot program had an effective first year, decreasing incidents of youth violence on school campuses by 37%. We should expand this innovative program to every high school and middle school in the city.

3. Create alternatives to high-risk juvenile behavior. Most juvenile crime occurs between 2 and 5 p.m., after they're out of school but usually before an adult is home to supervise them. We need to offer our youths positive alternatives to gangs, drugs and graffiti. We can do this by expanding the number of City-sponsored homework centers, creating more after school recreation activities, and establishing more job-training programs.

4. Crackdown on Graffiti. Graffiti is something that plagues our parks, businesses, and neighborhoods. The City implemented a new program to eliminate graffiti in San Jose parks within 24 hours. We should support this program and look to expand it beyond parks and into our neighborhoods. When it comes to our neighborhoods, one hour is an hour too long to live with graffiti. We should also work with the Police Department on ways to prevent graffiti vandalism.

5. Improving Code Enforcement in our neighborhoods. Like Graffiti, Code Enforcement touches the base of neighborhood pride--its appearance. Reporting Code violations, however, is often a mystery to many residents. We can make it easier to report and enforce code violations by housing Code Enforcement Officers in the Police Storefronts listed above. These officers can take complaints, and work with residents to eliminate code problems in our neighborhoods.

6. Create Community Coalitions between residents, police and the City. Rather that having the police or city staff come in and give our neighborhoods what they think we need, we should work to bring more people to the table, we should build community coalitions. Who knows more about what the problems of a neighborhood are? We should ensure that city resources are used to provide the necessary resources to build and maintain these coalitions. We should also bring all of the coalitions and neighborhood associations together once a year to share their successes and spread the use of best practices throughout our neighborhoods.

Next Steps

· Work with Neighborhood groups, the City Neighborhood Services Division, and the Police Department to establish community coalitions. · Work with Police Department and City to establish Police Storefronts in our neighborhoods. · Work with school districts, PTA's, and the City to establish more Homework Centers. · Work with the Parks Recreation and Neighborhood Services Department and Mayor to develop a strategy to eliminate all graffiti in 24 hours.