Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Its Like the Wild West

I've had a neighbourhood-watch-saturated day.
Was woken up this morning at 5.20 with an alert on the emergency channel: a women in a nearby house had caught a man unscrewing her burglar guards.
He had run away, leaving his tools and a knife outside her home.
By the time I got outside on our deck with my radio to keep watch on our section of the road (maybe 2 mins), about a dozen locals had made a cordon around the area where the perp may have been hiding.
To cut a long story slightly shorter, they caught him after seaching patiently for about an hour.
Then this afternoon, (I had just snuggled down for a nap) there they were again.
More stuff going down.
This time a woman had been mugged at gunpoint in the valley so all the NWatch's were brought in.
When guns are involved, the whole thing is cranked up a LOT.
The action was across the valley but we have a powerful telescope (usually used for watching whales and sharks)
So I spent hours (together with other observers) tracking various people who answered the description of the mugger: not easy because the area involved a stretch of beach; mountainside; railway lines; subways; rocks along the coast etc.

The photo gives you an idea - the area was across the bay at the base of the mountain.

But it looks a lot closer in real life - and I did have the telescope!

Eventually we heard that they were taking someone who answered the description to the police station.
Not sure yet if that was the guy.

The way the NWatch system is working is impressive: the guys (and gals) are fearless and persistent!
PS: Yes, its true - we live in a sleepy seaside town
but
the town is in SA.
:-)

3 comments:

Mel said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Mel said...

Sheesh. The buggers dont even take a break on the public holidays!

Great that the NW is doing so well, crime stats were phenomenally low last month - did you see?

Kevin said...

I grew up in the wild west - that picture is too pretty to be it. People are crazy...