A big part of our Crime Prevention program comes from our Volunteers In Patrol (VIP), neighbors who patrol in pairs and provide the police with extra eyes and ears in the neighborhood.
If you are going out of town and would like the VIP’s to specifically patrol near your house and to pull any flyers off the front door, please email vip@wilshireheights.org. Let us know your address and the dates you will be out of town. Your email will only be seen by VIP’s. Please contact Mark Moynahan, (214) 826-7297, if you have any questions.
Wilshire Heights neighbors know that our neighborhood enjoys a relatively low crime rate. Much of that is due to the weekly Crime Watch emails that keep us informed and remind us of the active steps we can take to reduce our risk. But another part of our Crime Prevention program comes from our Volunteers In Patrol (VIP), neighbors who patrol in pairs and provide the police with extra eyes and ears in the neighborhood. Currently, about twenty neighbors have gone through the four hour training class and donate two hours of their time each month. The VIP program is an alternative to the more expensive Extended Neighborhood Patrol (ENP) program where an off-duty police officer patrols in a marked squad car. With ENP, the cost of the officer’s pay, the squad car rental and time on the police computer can run up to $30,000 annually and requires a financial commitment from the neighbors. The VIP program is a non-confrontational program designed to help neighbors patrol with increased observation and to provide more specific details in the event of a 9-1-1 call. Our patrollers call 9-1-1 when they see something suspicious, but the most common issue reported is finding a garage door left open. As innocuous as an open garage door seems, alerting a neighbor in these cases has probably avoided a crime like a theft from a garage, or worse, a residential burglary. The action of patrolling with our Crime Watch signs and the yellow flashing light advertises to the visitors to our neighborhood – the construction workers, deliverymen or passersby – that we are active in our crime prevention effort. It can be a factor when a criminal is looking for an easy, low risk target and makes them look elsewhere. While it would be impossible to reduce our crime to zero, we feel that the VIP program has helped keep our crime low in Wilshire Heights. Our volunteers agree that the time commitment is minimal, and it’s a great way to get to know the neighborhood and other neighbors. Along with the Crime Watch emails and our active, involved neighbors, we’re keeping Wilshire Heights a great place to live. If you are interested in joining the VIP program, please contact the VIP coordinator, Mark Moynahan, at (214) 826-7297.