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Neighborhood watch programs have long encouraged citizens to take pride in the welfare of their communities and to adopt a proactive approach to crime prevention. While maximizing citizen vigilance and cooperation with lawful authorities has been associated with reductions in crime, some liberals figure such efforts and the corresponding signage to be unnecessarily exclusionary.
After revolting last year against the decades-old program of communal self-defense and surveillance, woke city councilors in Ann Arbor, Michigan, have since blown taxpayer dollars on the removal of all remaining evidence of the city’s Neighborhood Crime Watch program.
‘Neighborhood watch signs are expressions of exclusion.’
According to the resolution passed by the city council on Dec. 15 directing the removal of over 600 Neighborhood Crime Watch signs in Ann Arbor, “Neighborhood Watch programs emerged in the 1970s during a period of national anxiety about crime and social change” and were “often rooted in assumptions about who did and did not ‘belong’ in a neighborhood, reinforcing race-based hyper-vigilance and suspicion particularly toward black, brown, and other marginalized residents and visitors.”
The resolution claimed that this dynamic in Ann Arbor, a city whose population today is 66.5% non-Hispanic white, “encouraged informal surveillance practices that disproportionately targeted people of color and contributed to patterns of exclusion under the guise of public safety.”
Ann Arbor Mayor Christopher Taylor (D). Aaron J. Thornton/Getty Images
The signs that were posted throughout the city not only denoted a supposedly defunct program but anti-crime messages that “do not reflect Ann Arbor’s current public safety values or its commitment to nondiscriminatory enforcement, community trust, and safe spaces for all residents and visitors.”
Councilwoman Cynthia Harrison said when the resolution passed, “Signs don’t just sit there, they speak. For many people, especially black and brown residents and visitors, those signs have never felt neutral. They signal that unfamiliarity itself is suspicious, that their presence must be justified, that belonging is conditional,” reported the Michigan Daily.
Harrison joined Ann Arbor Mayor Christopher Taylor (D) and Councilwoman Jen Eyer on April 21 for the ceremonial tear-down of the final Neighborhood Crime Watch sign.
As their virtue-signaling campaign — which cost the city at least $18,000 from its general fund balance — came to a close, the leftist trio recycled the revisionist gobbledygook from their resolution.
“Neighborhood watch signs are expressions of exclusion,” said Taylor, reported MLive.com
Eyer stated, “It really hearkens back to a time when public safety was more about surveillance and exclusion of people from communities and trying to look out for anyone who looked different.”
After reiterating that the crime-prevention signs do “not align with our values,” Harrison stressed that “this is a great day.”
The Michigan Daily reported in March 1981 that “rather than quivering behind bolted doors, some Ann Arbor residents favoring stepped-up police protection are taking matters into their own hands.”
The Neighborhood Watch program, formally adopted the previous year in the wake of 30-year-old Rebecca Huff’s savage murder, “banded together neighbors in one-block sections of the city who look and listen for signs of criminal activity.”
“It’s more or less socializing and really getting to know your neighbors,” an Ann Arbor police detective said at the time. “People watch each other’s property, apartment-sit, and know each other’s cars. If a strange car is seen in the area, the residents can obtain the license plate number and call us on a special communication hookup.”
While Neighborhood Watch is officially no more in Ann Arbor, vigilant residents don’t need signs or permission to look after their communities and can always share insights and tips with one another on apps like Citizen and Nextdoor.
According to Neighborhood Scout, the likelihood of becoming a victim of a property crime and a violent crime in the Democrat-run city is 1 in 47 and 1 in 296, respectively.
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