Criminals never take time off, so don’t ever let your guard down when it comes to your safety.
Northcliff Melville Times reader David Raathoffers provides these crime prevention tips:
-Never assume that a stranger in the street is legitimate and harmless. Instead, assume that he is somehow up to no good (you can always apologise to him directly, or silently in your mind, if wrong).
-Always investigate when your dog has been barking.
-Always get your security company to come and investigate the suspicious person around your street. Understand, however, that the “spotter” will not be carrying anything offensive or suspicious. He expects to be confronted, and even searched, occasionally by the police or others, so all the breaker’s tools and amp and weapons will be in the car carrying the “worker” criminals who form the other half of that team harvesting your particular neighborhood that evening or day, and they work the day shift too.
-Do not be “polite” or at all reticent to make it quite clear that you have identified that person as a potential criminal. Instead, openly –where he can see and even hear you doing so, phone in a clothing description, his location and your suspicions. Rather be an “unmannered”, but alive resident than a courteous, but dead rape/robbery/burglary victim.
-Expect to be frustrated while trying to raise some security companies and the police, but persist till you get one of them on site .
-The mere fact that those scavengers have been seen and reported and made known to them, proved enough to make them move on, so even just that kind of alertness by us in the community already has a preventative effect.
