Cathy Hawkins and her husband just got tired of it all.
Tired of the trash littering her Bakewell cul-de-sac and riverbank below. Tired of picking up needles and smelling pot reeking off of people walking by her home. Tired of speeders treating her dead-end street like a highway.
But tired, most of all, that hardly anyone else seemed to care.
So she picked up the phone and started calling people who would care – her commissioner, neighbors and the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office.
“First of all when (residents) found out crime watch was coming in here a lot of people got mad,” Hawkins said. “They felt like it was a lot of nosey people trying to get involved in other people’s business.”
What Hawkins calls crime watch is the Hamilton County sheriff’s Neighborhood Watch program. Over the last two years the department has seen the number of active programs in the county go from a dozen to 80.
Monday night 60 residents gathered at Middle Valley Church of God to learn how to form their own neighborhood watch program.
“A lot of people say, ‘Let’s take back our neighborhoods,'” Chief Deputy Allen Branum told the crowd. “We don’t need to lose our neighborhoods.”
Allen and two deputies covered safety basics and urged the attendees from six Middle Valley neighborhoods to stay alert and get to know their neighbors.
Tina Shelton, a Clearwater Road resident, said she came to the meeting because her parents’ Thrasher Pike home had been burglarized twice.
She hadn’t been a crime victim and thought that connecting with neighbors might help keep it that way.
Shannon Wilson now coordinates the watch programs for the sheriff. About two years ago she said Sheriff Jim Hammond asked her to dig through past watch program contacts.
“Most of them had basically gone to the wayside,” she said. “They had just kind of laid dormant.”
There isn’t much work involved once the initial meeting is held, the phone tree or e-mail contact list is set and members agree to meet regularly, she said.
“It’s basically a nosey neighbor,” she said.
Throughout the meeting deputies reminded residents that they can’t be everywhere at once and police would rather have a call that amounts to nothing than not find out about an incident at all.
Hawkins said about 11 people are active in her neighborhood’s program out of a community of more than 200, but they have had a huge impact.
Over the last 10 years, she said the street had steadily declined. People were dumping trash off the side of the road. Police found mobile meth lab refuse. She watched men escort prostitutes past her house and down into the woods.
She and her husband “Hawkeye” Hawkins held their first meeting under the streetlight in the cul-de-sac. Shortly after crews came out and hauled out trash, medical waste, posted “No Dumping” signs and the group posted Neighborhood Watch signs.
A guardrail County Commissioner Fred Skillern had put up shortly after made it more difficult to get into the TVA property that bordered the street.
Not that they didn’t meet with resistance.
She said her husband was threatened in her front yard, told that “if we didn’t stop he would be shot and thrown in a ditch.”
But with a few improvements the area picked up, she said. And a slow 10-year downhill slide has had a real turnaround since the program started in April.
“I haven’t picked up a needle in two months,” she said.
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