Plans for Eastpointe Neighborhood Watch move forward

EASTPOINTE — Eastpointe Police Chief Corey Haines and Fire Chief Brian Marquardt are working together to bring the city’s Neighborhood Watch back, but they can’t do it without help from the community.

On July 17, Haines and Marquardt held their second Neighborhood Watch meeting at City Hall with approximately 20 people in attendance. During the meeting, Haines encouraged attendees to join the Eastpointe Police Neighborhood Watch Facebook page so they can view a map in which the city has been divided into eight sectors.

“That way you’ll know what sector you’re in and that will give you a better idea of where you need to make contact and see how many people you can find,” Haines said. “It used to be that we knew everybody who lived next door to us. Now we’re kind of siloed in our homes.”

From there, he asked participants to contact their neighbors to get their names and addresses to garner interest for the Neighborhood Watch group.

“We need to have it so that your neighbors are involved as well. You can’t have a successful neighborhood watch unless you have a group of people in your neighborhood that are willing to be part of the neighborhood watch. I would like to see a couple people on every block,” Haines said.

The Eastpointe Neighborhood Watch Program is a collaborative approach designed to make residents more aware of their surroundings. It will consist of a group of people living in the same area who work together to make the community safer. Members will learn how to identify crime areas, suspects, suspicious activity and crime patterns and bring that information to Eastpointe police. Eventually, officers will be assigned to the different sectors.

“It takes all of us to work together,” Haines said. “It takes us to be able to contact our neighbors and be able to share and exchange a little bit of information.”

There also are plans to create a new informational pamphlet about the program. During the meeting the subject of Ring home security cameras came up. Sometimes fire and police personnel are able to utilize them for cases under investigation.

“Sometimes people offer up the information,” Marquardt said. “Sometimes it shows something and sometimes it doesn’t. It depends on where you have the setting at and how far out the sensitivity is.”

One resident at the meeting, Walter Martin, already has a Neighborhood Watch in the city with some other neighbors off Beaconsfield Avenue and several residential streets north of Nine Mile Road. So far, things are going well.

“We got out and went door to door to get many people involved. We’ve got block captains on each block. We have very few issues,” Martin said. “That’s because our neighbors are watching out. We talk to each other. We have an email group. When the chief sends something out, I send it to about 60 people. It’s a collective effort.”

Check the Eastpointe Police Neighborhood Watch Facebook page for the group’s next meeting.