Safety At Home

There are many things people can do to keep themselves from becoming victims of crime. On March 23, 2009 Angela Gaines from the Chula Vista Police Community Relations Unit (job description) came to the meeting of the Southwest Chula Vista Civic Association and gave us an overview of CPTED. CPTED stands for Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design. Encouraging People to look out for one another while designing areas to prevent crime. She and her partner will come to businesses, multi-family units and private homes to do a walk around and assess security.

There are four areas of concern: Natural Surveillance, Activity Support, Natural Access Control, Territorial Reinforcement. If people are aware of and use these strategies the criminals will go elsewhere.

You can contact Angela at 691-5187 and arrange for a site visit or Neighborhood Watch meeting.

This is a video of CPTED presentation: Part 1

Part 2

She also talked about Crime Free Multi-Family Housing. Many of these strategies are appropriate to single-family homes as well. Here is the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fl-iYtJpgw

Kim Herbstritt from the Institute for Public Strategies (Neighborhood Safe Streets
Phone:619-476-9100x330
Email:neighborhoodsafety@publicstrategies.org). They have the County contract for dealing with Drug and Alcohol abuse problems. They use a strategy called Safe Streets Now which allows neighbors to take control of their neighborhoods and get rid of drug houses, gang activity and/or places where alcohol is being used inappropriately. This is video of her presentation explaining the four-step Safe Streets Now program: Documentation, Notification, Negociation/Mediation, Litigation. She showed two short videos documenting successful uses of this program.