Does National Night Out really help fight crime?

Tens of thousands of people in Western Washington took part in Tuesday’s National Night Out against crime.

In light of the recent shootings in Seattle and the violence across the country, can just meeting up with your neighbors really make a dent in crime?

“If you had National Night Out every night, we’d have a drastically reduced crime rate, that’s for sure,” says Jim Nolan, a professor of Sociology and Anthropology at West Virginia University.

He and his colleagues created a way to categorize neighborhoods based on the level of community involvement and the level of crime. They found the two are directly related.

“Where communities are collaborative, where they trust each other and they watch out for each other, even when other predictors of crime were there like poverty, population density, all those types of things that would normally predict high crime, where there is this trust and community collaboration crime is down,” says Nolan.

But Nolan says just one night won’t create the level of community involvement needed to make a dent in the crime rate. People are not likely to speak up unless they have a personal, sustained relationship with their neighbor.

“For people to believe they can defend their own space, they have to see themselves as interdependent and not dependent on the police to protect them,” says Nolan.

Nolan recommends setting up community cleanup projects or neighborhood discussion groups. He says it takes a village to raise a child.

“Watching out for the kids coming home from school, if the kids are skipping school,” says Nolan, “if people are paying attention to that kind of thing, we call it informal control, they intervene in a way very early on, which prevents things from getting out of hand.”

The more of that informal control that happens at a neighborhood level, Nolan says the less formal control has to be exercised by police.

A recent survey by PEMCO Insurance found 41 percent of Washington residents polled have met only a handful of their neighbors.

Ironically, a national survey just released shows around 75 percent of people think they would feel safer if they talked with their neighbors more often.