On My Mind

The value of the NWCP is NOT for crime prevention, and it is not for solving crime—it does neither.

The value of the organization is to make sure hundreds of ordinary citizens feel they have a responsibility to the community, and a rightful role in maintaining its safety. For that, and that alone, the NWCP should remain in existence. We must not rely on the police (who have far more serious problems than our relatively safe corner of Baltimore). We must understand that if we want to keep our community livable, then every single person must play a proactive role of some kind. The NWCP does an admirable job to that end.

And so I support the NWCP. But if I am afraid for my safety, or that of my family, I know Shomrim will come within seconds. I choose substance over symbolism.

Well, I will also be personally frank. The Upper Northwest District survived without Shomrim the last 28 years that the NWCP has survived. Not only has crime dropped exponentially during that time, but crime continues to go down. Northwest has been rated THE safest district in Baltimore, wholly in part of the NWCP.

Regarding the money, frankly, the $25,000 given to the police to help the horses could have been much better spent inside our community. The horses don’t, and never will, help our community. The money could have been given to Hatzalah, or even Shomrim.

The NWCP continues to be successful and continues to be supported by all levels and branches of city and county government. At the yearly melave malka, virtually EVERY SINGLE commander shows up at the dinner, which is a huge deal. I am proud to be a member of the NWCP, and I will continue to be a member until I am no longer able.

Perhaps it is Shomrim who is the duplicate here? We have police (who respond in an extremely timely manner). Who needs an additional organization to “capture” petty bike thieves? Who needs an additional organization to look for missing people? Hatzalah is a critical part of our community, and they have an excellent system that would likely be great at leading such a search. I did a search on CERT, and it looks like they are a specially trained group of people who have been given the training to successfully perform a missing person search. Perhaps they should be the lead? Why do we need Shomrim?

The point is, the NWCP is more of a need for the community than Shomrim is, or will ever be. Yeah, they are nice to have around, but not at the expense of another, long standing and successful organization, that does more for the community and forges more relationships for our community in the nightly three hours they patrol than Shomrim ever will.

I think that Isaac has a point.  Neighborhood statistics point to a tremendous drop in crime due to the patrol. Check crime rates before and within months of the patrol’s inception and you will be shocked. As someone who lived in the neighborhood both before the NWCP and after, I know what an amazing difference they have made in area safety. What Shomrim does is to an extent only possible due to the NWCP’s existence. What you are proposing is tantamount to dropping neighborhood beat cops because the SWAT team does such amazing work.  Moreover, you might look and see what the relationship between Shomrim groups and the police elsewhere has become. In New York, elements of Shomrim are nothing more than Jewish vigilantes.  Hopefully there will be no one who will disgrace the name here in Baltimore, but I know that there are a number of people who have been asked to leave the patrol because of their vigilante potential.  The knowledge that there is an officer, a watch commander, a patrol partner and a number of fellow patrol members listening and watching each night is a powerful incentive for good behavior and maintaining good neighborhood relationships. Those who don’t toe the line leave.  I wonder what controls Shomrim has over its members once that jacket is handed to them? There are still many who want to have “hands on” and mix it up with those they perceive as bad guys and those of them who join Shomrim with that attitude are ticking time bombs.  All it would take would be one hot-headed man in a Shomrim jacket to destroy any credibility that they may have.  There have certainly been Shomrim rumbles in New York that have put them in adversarial positions with the police as well as with neighboring ethnic groups. It would be remarkably short sighted to replace an organization like the NWCP that is stable, proven effective, and long-viewed in outlook, for the sake of saving the city half-pay of one police officer.  We need both, but in my view if it comes down to a choice between the two, my money is going to the NWCP.

I think you’re missing the point of NWCP. NWCP never tried to be a reactive force when crisis strikes. That’s Shomrim’s portfolio, and they do it well.

What NWCP was always meant to do, and what it apparently succeeds tremendously at, is prevention. NWCP creates a zone in which it is impossible for anyone out in the evening not to know that there is a watchful eye. Sure, it’s limited to a few hours in the evening, but I doubt that hoodlums out to commit crimes of opportunity are checking their watches against the NWCP schedule. There’s just a general atmosphere of ownership in this zone.

I haven’t reviewed the statistics myself, but I’m given to understand that the crime rates in the NWCP zone are much lower than in the neighboring areas and have been since before Shomrim started up. I guess it’s hard to do a controlled experiment, but if the only downside is the cost of half of a police officer and some gas money, it seems to me that this piece of Northwest Baltimore’s protection ain’t broke and doesn’t need fixing.

Decade-by-decade crime statistics that speak of thousands of crimes never attempted are not as easy to point to as a Shomrim blotter full of stories of rescued children and recovered bikes, but they’re no less important to the community.