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Spotlight on Neighborhood Watch after Trayvon Martin Shooting

Attention is turning to community crime watch programs in the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting. The teenager was shot and killed at the Retreat at Twin Lakes in Sanford. That's the gated community where shooter George Zimmerman helped lead a community patrol. The national director of neighborhood watch Chris Tutko says Zimmerman broke a cardinal rule by carrying a gun, and now he now wants volunteer crime prevention programs to review their policies.

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The National Sheriff’s Association created the neighborhood watch program in 1972. It now provides training and resources to over 25 thousand registered groups. Zimmerman’s patrol wasn’t one of them.

The national neighborhood watch director Chris Tutko says he tells watch members only to act as extra eyes and ears for the police. “There’s no intervention whatsoever and obviously no one carries a weapon with them, whether it be a gun whether it be mace, anything like that,”  he says. Tutko says the role of a neighborhood watch is mainly to communicate with the police and other neighbors.

He says he doesn't know of any community crime watch programs in the US which allow members to carry a weapon.

On its website, the Sanford Police Department advises watch participants not to take risks to prevent a crime or try to make an arrest.

It says neighborhood watch is not “the vigilante police”.

Before Martin was shot and killed The Homeowners Association for the Retreat at Twin Lakes, talked about its neighborhood watch program on Twitter.

The last post on its twitter feed dated February 12th, says the program led to four arrests in burglary cases.

Neither the Sanford Police nor the homeowners association returned calls for this story.

Tutko says in the wake of the Martin case, he’ll be looking at whether guidelines for watch groups need updating.

“One thing we will be doing is looking at our policies and procedures to make sure that we have some additional training, give them some ideas on what looks suspicious, what’s not suspicious.”

But he says rules about what not to do remain the same: don’t pursue vehicles or carry weapons, and never confront anyone while on patrol.

 

 

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