If you’ve been living in Platt Park for awhile then you’ve likely heard about the website Nextdoor.com and probably have logged on a time or two. Nextdoor serves; it would seem as sort of a community bulletin board for whatever anyone deems important or interesting. The site has been up for a couple years now and aside from filling our daily inboxes with additional clutter it does provide some interesting and occasional useful bits of information and is a great place to go when needing help, advice or you need to sell or buy something.
One thing is for certain, what CNN did for 24/7 news reporting Nextdoor has done for local crime updates. If you are like me, after reading the almost daily reports of car break-ins or suspicious people wandering about I’ve begun to wonder if the crime rate has increased dramatically around here or am I just hearing, for the first time everything that goes on, making it just seem worse. Well 3PA (Platt Park Peoples Association) president Nick Weidner dug in on some crime statistics published in the August issue of the Platt Park Post and the conclusion? Total crime in Platt Park is down from a year ago…interesting.
Putting all I can muster together on the subject a few things seem clear to me: I suspect all the crime reporting has made us a bit more vigilant about things like locking doors and not leaving stuff in our cars to tempt the would-be thieves—sure has for me. I also think the switch to individual trashcans verses dumpsters is helping. I’ve noted in my block way fewer alley-cruisers, which always was both a blessing and a curse (good for recycling, bad for opportunistic thievery). So let’s keep this trend going! We are an urban environment and not a gated community so no doubt some measure of crime will always be a part of life here but let’s each do what we can to make our neighborhood a less tempting target—keep up the good work!
See you around the neighborhood,
Tom Snyder