I tend to think that when you’re talking high crime areas, police patrols should be stepped up and not left to (generally) untrained civilians, i.e., anyone who signs up and is willing to give a night of his/her time here and there. But in reality, police cannot be everywhere, and they cannot even respond quickly enough for some urgent situations.
A vehicle beyond Neighborhood Watch is needed for high-crime areas, perhaps something along the lines of the Guardian Angels. In those areas where you need armed patrols, they’d have to be identifiable, well-trained, kevlon-vested, and deputized backup to the police.
You wrote:
A vehicle beyond Neighborhood Watch is needed for high-crime areas, perhaps something along the lines of the Guardian Angels. In those areas where you need armed patrols, they’d have to be identifiable, well-trained, kevlon-vested, and deputized backup to the police.
You are taking a God’s eye, 50,000 foot altitude view of the situation. Guys like Zimmerman (or you and me, for that matter) can’t affect how the mayor chooses to deploy the police. The mere existence of neighborhood watch groups is the result of the failure of the criminal justice system to find, arrest and incarcerate the perps who are wreaking havoc on their fellow citizens. There’s plenty of blame to go around, ranging from Miranda in 1966, to all kinds of other constraints on police conduct, including tort liability. The bottom line is that an ordinary joe like Zimmerman has to deal with the world as it is rather than the way he would like it to be. And that means being armed while conducting neighborhood watch patrols in his high-crime condo complex (6 burglaries and 1 home invasion in the past month, based on a skim of the Sanford PD web link on the Martin case), or not patrolling at all.