Residents of Austin’s Whittier Place Apartments off Fourth Street SE must feel safer in their neighborhood.

Tuesday, August 22, 2000

Residents of Austin’s Whittier Place Apartments off Fourth Street SE must feel safer in their neighborhood. That’s because the residents care about crime.

Whittier Place’s manager, Dawn Taylor, is the first graduate of the Austin Police Department’s Crime-Free Multi-Housing Unit Prevention Program.

Taylor participated in a daylong training session for multifamily-housing complex managers. Police also conduct a crime-prevention inspection of the complex. In the inspection, they look for things like lighting, peep holes in doors and windows obscured by shrubbery. Lastly, a tenants meeting is conducted, suggesting the residents can become a neighborhood watch unit for the police.

The desire by Taylor to participate in the program for her complex is proactive. A total of 14 other multifamily housing complex managers also are enrolled in the program.

The managers – and their tenants – are taking back their neighborhoods. If they see something, they confront the situation or call police.

"We want to make every neighborhood like it was years ago," Police Officer Steve Wald, the program’s coordinator, said. "That’s when people sat on their front porches and talked with each other and when they looked out after each others’ property and children."

There’s nothing wrong with that.