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Coming Together Problem Solving and the Neighborhood Watch Introduction It is just after 10:30 P.M. on a bitterly cold February night in 1997, and I have been riding shotgun in Jane Pratt’s immaculately clean white Buick Regal. We have been out patrolling for the neighborhood watch group for the past two and a half hours, and we decide to take a short break at the 7-Eleven on the corner of Third and Ridge Avenues. I stow the logbook that has been perched on my lap and scurry out of the warm car into the icy cold of the parking lot. The local beat car is also parked in the lot, and Officer Simpson and his partner for the evening are inside chatting with the owner of the store. Once inside the warmth of the store, Jane and I exchange pleasantries with the officers, and Jane asks Simpson if there is anything to which we should pay particular attention on our patrol. Simpson shakes his head and tells Pratt that everything is pretty quiet. There had been a rumor that some kid was selling drugs out of the 7Eleven parking lot, and Simpson shows Pratt a business card embossed with a marijuana leaf and a beeper number that he had confiscated from a teen earlier in the week. On this night, the numbing cold is the most effective deterrent to any illegal activity in the parking lot. Reinforced by beakers of freshly brewed coffee, we go back out to the Buick, and, as the car heats up, we plan what we are going to do for the remainder of our shift. We had concentrated our efforts in the first part of the evening on the myriad alleyways behind the houses in the western part of the neighborhood . We have a system for our shift. As Jane drives slowly through each alleyway, we search for graffiti on garage doors, on walls, even on dumpsters . When we spot a graffito, Jane idles the car, and I log the address, the type of graffito, and the surface on which it is displayed. Occasionally , a crooked street sign or a missing stop sign breaks the monotony. For 6 113 these we call home base on our two-way radio, and the responder relays the information to the city services twenty-four-hour hotline. The request for service will then be filled in due course from downtown. During the warmer months, there is usually some activity in the alleys, some underage youth sneaking a few cans of beer, or, after 11:00 P.M., the promise of curfew violators at one of the many local parks. On this night, we do the drudgework of logging each single incident of graffiti; at the halfway point in our shift, we have already filled about eight pages of the logbook, by my count more than fifty individual incidences of graffito. We decide to spend time by the factories in the northern part of the neighborhood, because Jane says that no one has recently spent time logging graffiti in this area. For the next hour and a half, until midnight, which is the usual quitting time for the patrol, we try to make good on our resolution, though the sheer volume of graffiti in the end defeats us. Jane decides to tell the next evening’s patrol to start at the factories and finish what we started. We go back to Ruth Breslau’s house, which is home base for the evening, and, after Jane gathers up the logs, radios, and other paperwork, we call it a night. This account reflects my third night on the Beltway Night Patrol neighborhood watch. At that time scarcely fourteen months had passed since the Powell-Harvey murders, yet the account of the night on patrol betrays all the hallmarks of a well-worn routine. There was a clear pattern to what we did each Friday and Saturday night (the BNP patrols only two nights a week), one that had been established by Jane Pratt, Kitty Kelly, Carla Wiesniski, Lydia Donovan, and the other volunteers on the BNP. This chapter tells the story of how some of the citizens of Beltway eventually responded to the Powell-Harvey murders. I chronicle the events that led up to the formation of the BNP, specifically the arrival of JCPT trainers in the neighborhood in March 1996 and the subsequent issues that...

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