By Matthew Nash
Olympic Peninsula News Group
SEQUIM — Police leaders are looking to re-energize the city of Sequim’s dormant Neighborhood Watch program.
In 2007, Sequim employed a full-time crime prevention officer, but citywide cutbacks ended the position along with coordinating programming in 2010, said Police Chief Sheri Crain.
The new plan, Crain said, is to reach out to 16 neighborhoods that already formed Neighborhood Watches and re-establish connections.
“We don’t want to bite off more than we can chew,” she said. “We want to know if we can do it.”
Part of the Neighborhood Watch program includes the police providing information on improving home security and sharing procedures for reporting crime.
“We have the capacity to re-engage and re-invigorate the program now,” Crain said.
“A vast majority of our neighborhoods are low crime and there are no crime-ridden areas. Sequim is pretty dog-gone safe, but the more we can do with prevention, the better.”
As the first step to re-establishing the program, Crain, Detective Sgt. Darrell Nelson, who now oversees the Neighborhood Watch program, and volunteers with the Sequim Police Department’s Volunteers in Police Service, met with several neighborhood block captains and citizens March 29 in the Sequim Transit Center.
After the 2010 cutbacks, Nelson said they’ve had a passive response to Neighborhood Watches.
“The problem with the passive approach is that we don’t have consistent contact and some neighborhoods become passive [in crime prevention],” Crain said.
“This is our opportunity to make the relationship more productive.”
Paul Muncey, Volunteers in Police Service coordinator, said despite the drop-off in city support, about 10 of 16 Neighborhood Watches were still active, but many of the block captains had moved away in that span so volunteers have been reconnecting with those areas.
“Block watch held together when we didn’t have the means to support it,” Nelson said.
Now the city is looking for partnerships and volunteers to keep the program going while bridging it with other programs such as the Community Emergency Response Team’s training and Map Your Neighborhood through other agencies.
“As we move into the future, we want to try to wrap it under one umbrella and help facilitate it,” Nelson said. “Ultimately, it’s about making the community safer.”
Muncey said literature on Neighborhood Watch is on order but mapping a neighborhood falls to the residents to carry out.
“We’re trying to communicate that we’re here,” Crain said. “We all have an obligation to know what’s going on in our community.”
Going forward, options still remain for the police department to increase the Neighborhood Watch program, Nelson said, including assigning one officer to have ongoing discussions with a neighborhood.
Crain said Lisa Hopper, code compliance officer, has shifted to run under the police department in the past year and she’ll look to do more crime prevention work, too. Sequim also has about 30 volunteers in the police department working in varying capacities, including a handful of dedicated officers to the Neighborhood Watch program.
For more information about Neighborhood Watch in Sequim, call 360-683-7227 for Nelson or Muncey.
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Matthew Nash is a reporter with the Olympic Peninsula News Group, which is composed of Sound Publishing newspapers Peninsula Daily News, Sequim Gazette and Forks Forum. Reach him at mnash@sequimgazette.com.
