Citizen Patrols: A Niche in the Way Communities Fight Crime

The recession and the state of the economy in recent years has affected everything from how people spend to how safe the streets are at night. Many police departments have had to reduce the number of officers they employ or the number of hours officers work due to budget cuts. Realizing this, neighborhoods and citizens across the country are beginning to take matters into their own hands and form citizen patrols.

A citizen patrol is when a member of the community who is not a member of the police decides to seek out and report a crime that they are seeing. A citizen’s arrest is when that person actually takes the accused person into custody and then turns them over to the local police. In recent years, people have formed neighborhood watch groups to report crimes and suspicious events, but now some people are going one step further and it’s causing all kinds of trouble.

The theory behind the citizen patrol is with good intentions, but those good intentions can cause various problems. For example, some citizens have been doing everything from issuing parking tickets to trying to arrest people who are committing a crime. This can cause tensions to rise and, in the case of parking tickets, those charged with illegal parking may not take the ticket seriously. Arguments about whether or not the person in the citizen’s patrol can escape and that can lead to a completely different situation.

Law enforcement agencies across the country are concerned that people are starting to get hurt if they don’t stop taking matters into their own hands. While the agencies can understand the public’s frustrations, they also don’t want to put the public in harm’s way.