Maxwell Park Neighborhood News
Maxwell Park Partners in Crime Prevention

by Sarah Hipolito

Communication Is the Key

Maxwell Park has a Yahoo! group of over 500 individuals, including city Councilmembers and Oakland Police Department (OPD) officers. Word gets around quickly whenever a crime takes place. Group e-mails were instrumental in arresting several youths burglarizing homes in our neighborhood and alerting neighbors to other suspicious events.

Patterns in Crime

Police look at crime methodology to find patterns. Often, criminals follow a pattern. For example, your house is burglarized. The officer comes to your house, documenting what is observed (time of day, method of entry, and items taken) in the police report. Clerks enter data from police reports into OPD's Record Management System (RMS), but it is not searchable. How can a detective working on a crime compare it to similar crimes? In about a year, the RMS will be upgraded so officers can enter and search reports directly from laptop computers.

What about crimes that are committed now? Deputy Chief Michael Holland demonstrated an interim searchable RMS at the Maxwell Park Neighborhood Council's June meeting. It is an Excel spreadsheet created by Holland's teenaged son as a summer project. It can be used to identify trends and series. A "trend" is a type of crime repeated by a number of individuals because it is successful; a "series" is a specific set of crimes done by an individual or group.

The Crime Prevention Neighborhood Action Team (CP-NAT) will enter data into the interim RMS. Holland will train the CP-NAT volunteers to input beat 28X residential-burglary and auto-theft reports at the Eastmont Mall substation. If the project is successful, it will be repeated throughout Oakland, with other crime prevention councils entering their beat data.

Partnerships

Nommi Alouf, Allendale Block Captain and Blight and Beautification NAT chair, created a crime-reduction partnership with the Oakland Public Works Department. Maxwell Park was dark and shadowy because the tall trees in the park blocked streetlights and was used by drug dealers and loiterers at night. Now that the trees have been trimmed, the park is brighter at night and is not so welcoming to illegal use.

The October MPNC Meeting will take place on Wednesday, October 12, at Maxwell Park Elementary School, at the corner of Fleming and Monticello, from 7 to 8:30 p.m. There will be an autumn potluck, so bring food to share if you plan to attend.

Walter Williams will coordinate a Halloween Walk for parents and kids. This is a great way to meet your neighbors and keep your kids safe.

Private and public partnering is a good example of how to stretch and maximize resources. Which partnerships would you like to create?