Fallout Feared for Neighborhood Watch

In the wake of the city’s first known slaying of a Neighborhood Watch activist responding to a dispute, fellow activists and police Tuesday expressed grief over Keith Brown’s death and concern that the tragedy would frighten residents away from a growing program they believe will save other lives.

“I think that was just an isolated incident that was a bad tragedy for everybody,” said Bob Brice, a Neighborhood Watch block captain in North Hollywood. “It was very upsetting to me because we’re trying to get our neighbors involved, and they hear of something like this and they’ll slam the door on us.”

Keith Brown, 42, the husband of Winnetka block captain Kathy Brown, was shot and killed Monday after he went to write down the address of a neighbor who had allegedly shouted obscenities at a woman walking her 3-year-old grandchild near his home.

It was the first such killing in the city where Neighborhood Watch was born in the late 1960s. And many in the tight-knit anti-crime community were especially shaken because Brown may have been following the Police Department’s advice by simply planning to take down his killer’s address before a confrontation ensued and he was shot.

“You’re not supposed to get involved, and he wasn’t; he was just writing down the address,” said a Van Nuys block captain, who asked not to be identified. “This is just awful.”

While Neighborhood Watch members and police grieved, they said that the tragedy should not be interpreted as a reason to scrap the program, but rather as a call for more neighbors to place the well-known Boris the Burglar signs in their windows.

Shelly Lieberman, a North Hollywood community representative to police, said the incident “re-emphasizes the need for Neighborhood Watch.

“I hope it does not discourage other people from getting involved,” Lieberman said. “It’s neighbor helping neighbor that’s going to help. We don’t have enough police--therefore the neighbors have to keep an eye out on things for themselves.”

Said Brice: “Everybody’s shaken by something like this, [but] people have got to get involved. Our society is too dangerous today not to get involved.”

With the LAPD and Sheriff’s Department concentrating greater resources in recent years on community-based policing, the once-scoffed-at program has been growing.

The LAPD’s West Valley Division--whose officers responded to find Brown bleeding on a sidewalk Monday--boasts the largest program in the San Fernando Valley, with 1,406 block captains organizing their neighbors to report crime.

The Valley’s four other divisions--Van Nuys, Foothill, North Hollywood and Devonshire--had another 2,930 block captains as of April, each of whom leads four or five or several dozen neighbors in watching out for each other.

Although figures for previous years were not available, Lt. Dan Hoffman of the LAPD’s Valley Bureau said the April, 1995, numbers represent an increase over 1994 in every Valley police division.

“The program is functioning smoothly,” Hoffman said, adding that the number of participants “continues to increase.”

“For three years now here in the Valley we’ve had a decrease in major crimes,” he said. “And the citizens get a lot of the credit for that.”

Citizens like Keith Brown, Hoffman said.

“This was a guy that was a helper,” he said. “All of us in the city should be broken up.”