When Cheryl Simmons started the East Side Crimewatch listserv six years ago for personal reasons, she never expected it to balloon to 1,200 subscribers. A California native and East Side resident since 1998, Cheryl was upstairs in her home at noon on a Wednesday in 2010 when she heard what sounded like glass breaking on the first floor. Thinking a vase had fallen off a shelf, she arrived downstairs to see that a man had thrown a brick through a window, was cutting the window screen and already had one leg in the house. She later learned that two of her neighbors had similar experiences within the next 48 hours. Using a smaller listserv she had started in 2008 to stop RIPTA from putting a bus line down President Avenue, Cheryl held a meeting in a local church. Lieutenant Ryan and several patrol police officers attended and informed the neighborhood what they could do to help prevent crime.
“Many people are not aware of how much crime actually happens in the area; it looks so gorgeous and bucolic,” Cheryl says. “The list works off of reports coming from a local crime website. If anything significant is going on, Lieutenant Donnelly will also alert me to it. I tell my fellow East Siders that when there’s crime, first report it to the police and then email me, and I will blast it out to the list anonymously. It can happen in real time.”
The listserv has helped in many ways. One resident posted that they had seen the contents of a woman’s purse strewn about a sidewalk, and the woman happened to be a subscriber and was then able to go and retrieve some of her belongings. Other important area topics are also occasionally discussed, such as the new parking meters. And though she can’t name names, Cheryl notes that many high-profile leaders in Providence also subscribe and pay attention; that it’s not “venting into the air.”
She finds two main challenges in terms of reporting: “By encouraging people to be on alert for anything unusual, you find one extreme of people who are afraid to mention anything suspicious out of fear of profiling, and the other of people who are all too willing to report anything at all – even if it’s not actually a crime. I try to educate about what qualifies as suspicious behavior, and that seems to be slowly sinking in. I post 99.9% of the things submitted, but I curate ones that are obviously off the wall.”
Cheryl provides this valued service for no compensation other than the gratification of helping her neighbors and another reason: “If I didn’t enjoy it, I wouldn’t do it, but it does allow me to stay completely in the loop. It grew organically out of my own situation, but it helps bring the community something useful and keeps us together, and it’s minimal effort on my part.”
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