Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Neighborhood Watch

Episode Date: January 7, 2026

Since 1972 neighborhoods have been officially banding together to prevent crime together. Does it work? It seems to. Does it go too far? It often does, yes.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc. And send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one-page business plan for you.

Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. I'm Evan Ratliff here with a story of entrepreneurship in the AI age. Listen as I attempt to build a real startup run by fake people. check out the second season of my podcast shell game on the iHeart radio app or wherever you get your podcasts hey and welcome to the short stuff i'm josh and there's chuck and this is short stuff because

jerry's here for dave and uh we're talking about the neighborhood watch so look out that's right uh i think the the fact of this podcast is right off the bat yep uh because if you've ever seen a neighborhood watch like the official neighborhood watch sign as in the National Neighborhood Watch program official organization. If you've ever seen that sign and that, I was going to say silhouetted, but it's really just sort of a kind of a cartoony black figure on those orange and white signs. It looks very much like a film noir villain. That guy actually kind of peering back over his shoulder.

That dude has a name, and it's Boris the Burglar. Yep. Very good, nice little trivia point. Yeah. I think one of the things that fascinates me, me about this and why I picked this one. And also thanks to Tara Yarr-Lagata and Adoye Johnson, the first from How Stuff Works, the latter from the Howard University School of Law. But like when I see signs like that, they seem like an urban archaeological find because they're from

the 70s, the very early 70s, and sometimes in old neighborhood. And, you know, Atlanta's chock full of old neighborhoods. You can tell that sign was put up in 1972. Yeah, yeah. And that neighborhood watch probably hasn't functioned for 40 years, you know, and I just find that super fascinating. So because of that fascination, I've dragged us into the discussion about neighborhood watch as it is. That's right, which was formed officially in 1972 after a rise in crime in the late 60s. Thank you, let it gas. Again, the National Neighborhood Watch program is the official name, and that's under the umbrella of the National Sheriff's Association. And it's a national organization in that they have guidelines. You can get some information and pamphlets on kind of how to

run one in your neighborhood, although we'll see that kind of depends on your neighborhood what you want to do with this program. Sure. But they don't like, there are way too many neighborhood watch programs, you know, local ones for them to really be involved in matter on a national level. It's just sort of the umbrella organization. Yeah, which can be a criticism, as we'll see. But the whole idea is basically you can, the cops can get an assist from people who are kind of looking for problems in their neighborhood, or at the very least are on enough lookout that when it happens, they notice it, right? They don't just walk right past it. And then you can call the cops, and then the cops come, and then the burglar, Boris the burglars thwarted. And all of this is

kind of based on what's called the Chicago School of Social Disorganization Theory. It's a sociological theory from the 20s and the 30s, which basically says if you have a neighborhood that doesn't have very strong social ties, so neighbors don't really know each other that well, they don't trust each other that well, and very little community control where people feel very confident about just committing crimes, that's the most vulnerable kind of neighborhood. Yeah. And so a neighborhood watch essentially is meant to at least take care of the second one, where it's like, you know, we're going to make sure you don't feel confident about committing crime. but it doesn't necessarily fulfill the first one, which is to bring communities together. Yeah, that's right. We should mention kind of briefly that for a little while after 9-11, the NSA got a grant from the Department of Justice

where they rebranded as USA on watch, where they're like, hey, not only should you just be looking out for Boris the burglar, but you should be looking out for terrorists in your neighborhood. But that grant ran out, and they said, yeah, maybe we should just stick to being a neighborhood to watch. Yeah, it went from keeping an eye on your neighborhood to spying on your neighbors, I think was essentially the spirit of it. Yeah, it's pretty great. This was the era when the postal workers, the mail carriers were expected to spy on everyone. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it was a very paranoid time. Yeah. Understandably so. It was a really rough time for the United States. Yeah, some would say there was a privacy grab that happened. Oh, I hadn't thought about that. Or a, you know,

lack of privacy grab, I guess. No, I get what you mean. An intrusive intrusion? Yeah. Let's take a break. We're saying it just right. Yeah, right. Let's take a break, man.

And we'll come back and talk about whether these things actually prevent crime in the first place. All right. We'll be right back. Kyle, could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc, and send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one-page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link.

There was no business plan. It's not his fault. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. My name is Evan Ratliff. I decided to create Kyle, my AI co-founder, after hearing a lot of stuff like this from OpenAI CEO, Sam Aldman. There's this betting pool for the first year that there's a one-person billion dollar. company, which would have been like unimaginable without AI and now will happen. I got to thinking, could I be that one person?

I'd made AI agents before for my award-winning podcast, Shell Game. This season on Shell Game, I'm trying to build a real company with a real product run by fake people. Oh, hey, Evan. Good to have you join us. I found some really interesting data on adoption rates for AI agents and small to medium businesses. Listen to Shell Game on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. So, Chuck, the idea of a neighborhood watch makes sense, but not everything that is intuitively right actually pans out when put under scientific scrutiny. It turns out neighborhood watch programs do hold up under scientific scrutiny.

At least one study from all the way back in 2006, not a lot of studies about Neighborhood Watch programs. apparently. They found 18 other studies, and 15 of those showed that Neighborhood Watch programs seem to prevent crime, like the Neighborhood Watch program came along, and a decline in crime happened afterward. So it does seem like they can prevent crime. They don't necessarily thwart crime in progress, I guess. Yeah. I mean, they will tell you, and proponents of the program will say, like, hey, just having that sign up in your neighborhood is going to prevent crime somewhat because, you know, if a near-do-well sees that you're under neighborhood watch, they'll just move on to another neighborhood. Yeah, I don't know about that,

but that's what they say. Well, it makes sense. Like, especially a non-professional who's just like, I'm going to break into houses, they might give them a second thought. So even if it prevents one burglary, it's a crime deterrent. Sure. If you want to organize one of these things, you can recruit people and get together. You can schedule some meetings. You can get some local law enforcement in there maybe to come to one of those meetings and kind of discuss how these things go. If you're like a really buttoned down neighborhood watch group, you might have an actual liaison with law enforcement. You might have a group coordinator and block captains and stuff like that. They might have sashes in the well-funded neighborhood watch group. They might. They might even have patrols. And this is where it can get. a little dodgy, because there have been plenty of instances in the United States where these things have turned from sort of neighborhood watch where you see something and you maybe call the

cops to people kind of acting on their own vigilante style. Yeah. Or people on their own calling the cops just because someone is guilty of, you know, being a person of color in their neighborhood. That certainly happens all the time. Yeah, it does. So you talked about a lack of oversight. And the fact that the National Neighborhood Watch Association just doesn't, they can't possibly keep up with them.

I think there's something like 28,000 neighborhood watch groups that are registered right now. And probably a lot of them are defunct, but there's still, that's way too many for this probably just paper thin funded organization to keep up with. So they're just like, hey, you know, they register with us. So we tell them best practices, but if they turn into vigilante groups, we don't know about it. It has nothing to do with us. Some people are like, I don't know if that's true. You're actually encouraging the formation of these groups in the first place. You can make an argument that a neighborhood would come up with their own concept of a neighborhood watch anyway, probably.

Right. So it does seem like the National Neighborhood Watch Association is probably fairly, at least not guilty. Their hands aren't dirty, I guess is what I'm trying to say. But even still, they're quite aware that some of these Neighborhood Watch groups, whether they're registered or not, do evolve into vigilante groups. Yeah, I mean, I think nationally their aim is pure, but then when you get the wrong neighborhood and a wrong group of people, like happened here in the state of Georgia, you might have a neighborhood watch group targeting a family that they don't like being there and sitting

outside their house and digging through their trash and photographing the family and digitally audio recording them and monitoring their movements. That has happened. In Springfield, Missouri, the Klan set up a neighborhood watch and had signs saying, Neighborhood Watch, you can sleep tonight, knowing the Klan is awake. Yeah, we talked about well-funded groups, too. Some of them will use police scanners. Some of them even have invested those flashing dome lights like a naked gun or police squad for their cars when they're going to respond to a report.

Yeah, you're not a cop. Still, this is your neighbor who works in IT during the day and frankly drinks one or two beers too many each night. Right. Showing up with a flashing light at your front door because your neighbor across the street thought that you were doing something suspicious or somebody was doing something suspicious at your house. Yeah. That is not okay under basically any circumstance. Again, like you said, the concept is pure. It gets perverted way too easily because it gives power to the people.

who want the power because those are the ones very often who volunteer for this stuff. Yeah, for sure. And, you know, I talked about different crimes that were committed. Of course, the most obvious is when George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager in Sanford, Florida in 2012. And Zimmerman, you know, supposedly was a neighborhood watch volunteer. And I think their neighborhood watch was not one of the official under the National Neighborhood Watch, or at least the National Neighborhood Watch, was like, oh, they weren't us. Right. But that's how far it can go. So, you know, we want to keep our neighborhood safe, but settle down. Man, that was a, this seems like a lifetime ago, doesn't it?

Yeah, man. Yeah, that's, it was sort of. I mean, what, 2012? How many years ago is that? 13? Yeah. Yep, right on the nose. So there is, yeah, there's nothing inherently wrong with keeping an eye in your neighborhood, especially if it helps you meet some of your neighbors and you guys work together to prevent people from breaking into your homes or selling drugs on your street or whatever. It's totally understandable. It seems like, according to the National Neighborhood Watch Association, that the kind of the steps that they've laid out since 1972 are not necessarily followed, but that doesn't mean that groups are just not forming. They're forming in other ways Yeah.

Through, like, text chains, like, you know, neighborhood text threads. There's a lot of neighborhoods that Facebook pages. Yeah. Next door is a big one. Yeah. Yeah, if you want to read some crazy off-of-the-chain stuff, like, go on to next door, it can be pretty entertaining. And then Ring, which is that camera video doorbell, the first one, I think, now is owned by Amazon. They partner with law enforcement, and they're really doing their best to fill in the gaps.

in the police state. Yeah, and if you're, if you want to get one of these started in your neighborhood and want to be on the up and up and do it the right way, you can go to that National Neighborhood Watch website and get officially registered. They will have some resources to kind of guide you along.

But again, you know, do it the right way. It's not a crime to just be in your neighborhood. And you see plenty of, you know, videos every day on social media where somebody, you know, sometimes, someone that does live in that neighborhood is even accosted because they're a person of color who dares to park in their own driveway and walk to their own front door. That has happened before.

Yeah. Yeah. I think, well, geez, chuck the short stuff's out on that bummer note. I think so. Okay. Stuff you should know is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts to My Heart Radio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Thank you.