Neighborhood watch

[2] In the United States, neighborhood watch groups increased in popularity throughout the 1980s and 1990s in part as a response to the perceived ineffectiveness of new policing strategies.

[8] The current American system of neighborhood watches began developing in the late 1960s as a response to the rape and murder of Kitty Genovese in Queens, New York.

[13] In August 2011, police and municipal authorities in Petropavl city, the administrative center of the North Kazakhstan province, introduced the concept of a "neighborhood watch".

Having studied Estonia's neighborhood watch model, police chief of this province set up a special office consisting of a 24-hour telephone hotline operated by civilians to respond to citizen complaints and anonymous tip offs.

To support their work, the provincial authorities spent 15 million tenge that year to set up billboards and play television and radio ads encouraging citizens to report wrongdoing or anything suspicious to the police: "the safety of your home, your family and friends is in your hands".

[citation needed] Some attempts to introduce the neighborhood watch program have been made in the cities of Taraz (2016), Aqtau (2017) and Qyzylorda (2020) but they produced little success and have been largely ignored in other parts of the country.

[20] In another incident involving a neighborhood watch, Eliyahu Werdesheim,[21] part of an Orthodox Jewish community in Maryland, was convicted in May 2012 of second-degree assault and false imprisonment for beating and then pinning down a teenager he thought suspicious in 2010.

[26] In response to the Trayvon Martin case, Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) began drafting a bill that would require neighborhood watch groups to be certified and limit their duties.

Currently, with local police agencies setting guidelines for their neighborhood watches, groups across the U.S. vary greatly in their scope, function, the level of activity by their members, and training.

Robert McCrie, professor of security management at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, disagrees with Lee's initiative.