Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Crime in Cohousing (was) [C-L]_Basic and derived needs

[Howard Landman (howard]

> On Tuesday, July 29, 2003, at 07:52 PM, Kay Argyle wrote:
>> One member ended up in the ER after interrupting a car break-in -- 
>> nobody has ever gotten around to seeing to it that the broken lamp
>> by the parking lot got fixed, or mounting the security cameras one
>> member keeps talking about.

When we first moved in to River Rock there were a few instances of
people rummaging through unlocked cars at night.  I offered to put
up a cheap video camera for monitoring.  There was violent opposition
from several individuals who said they didn't want to live "in that
kind of place".  So I never did.

I never felt that these people articulated any kind of rational
position - it was all emotional.  They couldn't even distinguish
between the various kinds of cameras (fake ones placed in a prominent
location to make people *think* they're being watched, say, versus
real ones placed in a hidden location to catch people doing things
when they think they're *not* being watched) and explain which ones
they objected to most.  It was all the same to them.  I got the sense
that that they had some kind of deep-seated loathing of "gated
communities" and would go off the deep end at anything that resembled
one.

These kinds of incidents have tapered off as the street people learned
that there are too many eyes here.  Still, we occasionally find
some stranger sleeping in the common house basement, usually in
the winter when it's bitterly cold.  So we're relatively, but not
absolutely, safe.

Personally, I would rather have gotten the car burglars arrested before
they harmed anyone else.  "All that is necessary for evil to triumph
is for good people to do nothing." - Edmund Burke (1729-1797)

        Howard A. Landman
        River Rock Commons
        Fort Collins, Colorado

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