Police hear West End crime concerns - Herald & Review

DECATUR — Worrying about crime is starting to take a bite out of families' sense of well-being in Decatur's West End neighborhood.

Concerned residents organized a meeting with Decatur police Wednesday night and were given two messages: to fight back, ordinary people have to be willing to step up to assist the police, who are working on a new plan to help them.

Standing at a lectern in a chapel of Westminster Presbyterian Church, where the meeting attended by more than 70 people was hosted, crime prevention officer George Kestner preached the gospel of self-help.

He urged people to install surveillance and security systems in their homes and not to forget to do basic things, such as locking their cars. “We all tend to get complacent,” he warned.

Kestner said Police Chief Jim Getz tasked him with coming up with a plan to sharpen the strategy on fighting crime, too.

“I have a three-pronged attack planned,” he said. “I call it EEP: The first part is education, the second part is enforcement and the third and final part is partnership.”

Education includes a more proactive approach to working with the public to help them take better care of their home, car and personal security. Enforcement is the police concentrating resources to more precisely target particular crime problems. “Things like saturated patrols,” said Kestner, who is also the officer running the Crime Stoppers program.

He said partnership means civilians have to be willing to take an interest in their neighborhoods, join a neighborhood watch and pick up the phone when they see something suspicious. “If you see something, say something," he said.

Some West End residents were concerned that crime levels in their neighborhoods were spiking, but the statistics don't quite bear that out. Kestner ran some numbers and said between January and September this year, there were 16 residential burglaries, eight nonresidential (to structures like garages) and some 40 auto burglaries. The numbers were up a little from this time last year, but not dramatically.

West End resident Kent West helped organize the meeting and said just one crime is devastating if it happens to you. Speaking before the meeting, he also accepted that residents have to willing to get involved. He's hoping to try kick some new life into neighborhood watch efforts which got under way in earnest a year ago but have since faded somewhat.

He said anecdotal stories he's heard point to a spike in crimes like thefts from cars since about midsummer. He said taking a more proactive approach to security is a priority.

“People feel comfortable, they leave things unlocked, like car doors,” he said. “But they've got to get beyond that and realize we're going to have a big risk until some of these criminals are caught.”

Although catching them isn't always the answer citizens and the police might hope it would be. Getz spoke to the audience, which included Decatur City councilmen Pat McDaniel and Bill Faber, noting juvenile offender laws can make it difficult to detain young suspects, even if police are aware they could be responsible for several crimes.

He said he could understand societal reluctance to lock up teenagers but said there are hard-core cases that needed it.

“Believe me, it is frustrating; you get a group of kids like this and they will terrorize a neighborhood," Getz said. "We will arrest them and a week or two later they're back on the streets, doing the same thing.”

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