A Much-Needed Lift for All Us Potential Crime Victims

Tuesday was National Night Out Against Crime.

Maybe you knew this, and maybe you participated--by turning on your outdoor lights, or attending a block party, or marching in a parade--but odds are good that you did not.

National Night Out is an annual event, begun in 1984. This year its organizers say some 21 million people joined in nationwide, although apparently not too many of them were in Southern Californian.

The idea behind the event is to show the bad guys that we won’t take it any more--which of course, we will, and we do--and to give all of us potential crime victims a psychological lift.

Which, cynicism aside, is not such a bad idea.

Most of us could use just such a psychic boost right about now. Drive-by shootings, rape, child abuse, robbery, another drunken driver death. It’s news like this that stirs our fear. Only the naive and uninformed, these days, can believe that crime can’t happen to them.

The other night our telephone rang, at 4 a.m. It was our neighbor, a single mother, calling to let us know that she had just seen a prowler jump the fence. The police were en route.

What could we do with this information, my husband and I thought, other than check the locks yet another time and lie awake with worry? Which is what we did. The man was never found.

Now, as I write this, I hear that police captured three people this morning in the parking lot of our local supermarket, where they ended up after a 22-minute chase. The police believe one of these people had just shot a man five times at a freeway rest stop. For no apparent reason.

So what I think as I hear this is that I am lucky that I wasn’t there, with my daughter, buying milk as all of this went down. And then I think back that we were lucky, too, that the neighborhood prowler decided to skip our house. This time around.

I know that in the larger scheme of things, such thoughts are trivial. Orange County, according to the latest FBI report, has less crime per capita than areas of comparable size. The most recent statistics from the California Crime Index, however, show an overall 5.5% jump in major crimes in the county. Homicide took the biggest leap, up nearly 19% from 1988 to 1989.

Still, our particular neighborhood is safer than most. As far as I know, none of my neighbors sells drugs, or steals cars, or harbors any fugitives in their home. And I, for one, have no deep psychological scars gouged into me at the point of a knife, or from the barrel of a gun.

But yet I have fears--that someday I, or a member of my family, or a friend, will.

Matt Peskin, national project coordinator for the National Assn. of Town Watch, the Pennsylvania-based organization behind the National Night Out, says that most Americans do. National surveys bear this out.

Peskin mentions our fast-paced lives, with parents at work, kids hanging out with their friends, neighbors who wouldn’t know each other if they went bump in the night.

Which is what criminals love.

Turn on the lights, meet the neighbors, keep an eye out for your new friends, then the criminals, like cockroaches, will scurry back toward the dark. That was the theory behind Tuesday’s Night Out.

“The overall idea is to re-create the neighborhoods of the ‘40s and ‘50s where people looked out for each other and knew the cop on the beat,” Peskin says. “Generally, most people want to be neighborly. . . . And if (the Night Out) didn’t have long-term benefits, beyond some promotional thing, we wouldn’t do it.”

Jean Boyd, who has lived in Corona del Mar since 1963, says she is a case in point. After a man followed her home from the bank around Christmas in 1984, then grabbed her purse as she stepped out of her car, neighbors alerted by her screams called police. The man went to jail, and Jean formed a neighborhood watch group.

On Tuesday, as part of the National Night Out, neighbors met at her home to talk about crime prevention with an officer from the Newport Beach police.

“Here we look out for each other,” Boyd says. “It’s like a buddy system. We tell people, if there are things that aren’t right, please call the police.”

And Sgt. Mike Gray, of the Anaheim police, says that the Night Out is great P.R. In Anaheim, he says, more than 6,000 neighbors got together at block parties throughout the city.

“This gives us a chance to advertise,” Gray says. “And for the normal officer to go out where people are celebrating, rather than complaining, it’s sort of a neat experience.”

On a broader level, of course, no one can measure just how beneficial such feel-good gimmicks as the Night Out really are. I’m thinking of the “Hands Across America” stunt of a few years back. Here, again, the glow faded fast.

After celebrating the National Night Out Against Crime, millions of Americans made sure to lock their doors before they went to bed.

Which, let there be no doubt, is simply the prudent thing to do.

“Yes, we all have our fears,” says Gerri Winkelman, a Tustin therapist who counsels victims of violent crime. “I have mine. It is rational to be aware of the fact that you are surrounded by crime. . . . And the more knowledgeable that you become, the more suspicious and the more cautious that you are. . . . This just makes good sense.”

David Mann, a clinical psychologist in Mission Viejo, says the same. Crime victims, too often, are unaware of risks. When their luck does run out, the trauma of victimization can be that much more severe.

So maybe next year, on the first Tuesday in August, even more Americans will turn on their lights and gather in the streets with their neighbors as part of a Night Out Against Crime.

A little symbolic empowerment might not lower the crime rate immediately, but then again, it just might help.

Dianne Klein’s column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Klein by writing to her at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7406.