By Jason Klaiber
Staff Writer
For those looking to make East Syracuse a safer place to live, a neighborhood watch has been organized to combat village-wide criminal activity.
A group of about a dozen residents and Officer Alex Fratini from the Town of DeWitt Police Department met on Dec. 4 at the village hall on North Center Street to discuss a plan of action for the watch.
For easier communication, the neighborhood watch will be split up into four separate districts, either to be labeled as Western, Central, Eastern and Southern or instead numbered one through four.
In addition to the Facebook page for the watch, email chains will be set up for these different parts of the village, according to Fratini, who took up the initiative to create local watches.
“We’re learning as we go,” Fratini said. “We’re going to have to have the help from the whole community. It’s not just going to be a mini group or a vigilante group that’s going to go out there and solve everything.”
Fratini said the monitoring system should not act as an alternative to calling an emergency number for situations where immediate assistance is necessary. He also said he won’t explicitly encourage people to interfere with a crime in process or feel obligated to consistently leave the house to survey the area.
“If it’s urgent, call 911,” he said. “The number one priority is everyone’s safety.”
Robin Evelyn, the president of the watch, joined after speaking with Fratini at a Town of DeWitt board meeting in October.
From there, more neighbors have been recruited.
“[The neighbors] seemed to be open to the idea of starting this up,” Evelyn said. “They had a number of concerns in regards to crime. They wanted to do something to make the community what it used to be.”
Flyers were also passed out in the classrooms of East Syracuse Elementary for students to bring home to their parents.
Evelyn said the neighborhood watch can additionally function as a way to help community members meet up and help one another complete tasks such as obtaining groceries or shoveling snow.
“This is how things get done,” Evelyn said.
The next meeting will take place in the next eight to 10 weeks, Fratini said.
“As far as establishing the program, you’re going to have residents that are dedicated and committed, and they’re going to be the ones that are kind of like the glue,” Fratini said. “Some people aren’t always going to show up. We want to get as many people involved as we can whether you want to be fully in it or you just kind of want to be on the outskirts.”
