The New Neighborhood Watch

Sunday morning, and my neighborhood WhatsApp is at it again.

Citizen screenshots. Garage break-ins. Strangers loitering on Ring.

Not long ago, these friendly neighborhood chats were about escaped Bengal cats, second-hand car seats, and block parties. Life was good!

But unfortunately our babysitter board has become a digital precinct patrolled by parents who tuck kids in at night, then moonlight as amateur detectives.

Welcome to the new neighborhood watch.

If you live in a major U.S. metropolitan city, you probably already know what I’m talking about.

Chances are you’re part of your own “neighborhood watch” group and if you’re not, maybe you should consider starting one.

For us, our neighborhood watch started a year ago, after a mother was brutally attacked while pushing her newborn through a nearby alley.

Three local moms knocked on doors, asking neighbors to chip in for round-the-clock private security. Sixty households signed up at $400 a month. Now patrol cars sweep the streets day and night, and a fragile sense of safety has returned.

Another neighbor donated part of their yard to mount a Flock Safety license plate reader. Frustrated people in in our neighborhood (mostly parents) passed the hat so we could split the subscription.

At my own house, I swapped Ring for Deep Sentinel. 24/7 remote surveillance with live guards backed by AI that makes Ring look like a toy. Yes, another subscription. Yes, worth it.

We started arming up with the best tech we could find to keep the block safe. Most of it came from scrappy startups.

Defense tech isn’t just for governments anymore. It’s coming to the cul-de-sac.

After “arming up” with tech, we thought we were okay.

But this summer, at 7 a.m., a homeless man randomly attacked a neighbor’s gardener with a piece of lumber and sent him to the hospital, on a family street where kids ride scooters.

Yes, that sentence sounds absurd if you read it again. But it’s real and happening in a city where we pay the nation’s highest taxes.

My friend Braden (the homeowner) quickly shared a Ring camera image of the guy in our neighborhood WhatsApp group. He’d fled the scene and we needed everyone to be on the look out.

Six hours later, a different neighbor spotted the attacker in a nearby park during their commute home from work and sent our group chat a message with a photo.

Braden linked up with private security and literally ran him down like something out of a superhero movie, while another neighbor dialed 911 and gave his location. Security beat the cops to the scene and held him til they made the arrest.

Without our modern day neighborhood watch, he’d probably still be out there.

This isn’t just Los Angeles.

Across America, taxes are up and public services are down. Anyone who actually lives in a major US city feels it, no matter how many press conferences insist “crime is down” and “the data proves it.”

Parents in our neighborhood don’t expect perfection. We know cities are messy, and we’re not naive enough to think it’s ever going back to some 1950s postcard. But we do want safe sidewalks, clean parks, and kids who get to grow up as kids. Too often, even that feels out of reach.

So we build our own solutions. If we can’t fix the world, we’ll start with the sidewalks and streets where our kids take their first steps.

Our neighborhood watch wasn’t meant to be the cavalry. But when no one else rides in, you fire up the group chat and saddle up.