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Have YOU ever been involved with Neighboorhood Watch groups?

They are on the lookout for anything which is suspicious.

They do not “Go looking for trouble”.

I find it very difficule to believe that Zimmerman was ‘looking for Martin’ specifically.

IF you have never lived where the neighboor dramatically changed & you never needed a Neighboorhood Watch, I applaud you.

For those of us who have seen & felt & lived with such sudden changes in our happy single family home neighborhoods, we know things can be alot different.

The 1971 Los Angeles earthquake INSTANTLY turned nice single family home areas into overpopulated areas with multiple people living 20 to a house & with no connection to the OWNERS in the neighborhood. It was disgusting. The white flight was added to the problem with the ‘integration’ of the schools & the bussing of kids 2 hours each way.

I lived it. Couldn’t go to the grocery store after dark-—too dangerous. Locking gas caps on your vehicles or you got your gas stolen. Dogs who were keeping watch got poisoned. Burglary rates skyrocketed. Sirens all night long. ‘Sky King’—the LAPD helicopter circling almost every night. Gunshots heard over a mile nightly. A large ‘low income’ apartment complex so bad that cops refused to go into there in BROAD DAYLIGHT. At least one body a day dragged out of there by the EMT’s or the Coroner, according to the nurse who lived on our street & worked at what was once the best trauma center in the area-Northridge Hospital. Today, the trauma center is closed because too many gang problems & no one was paying for their problems.

I learned to sleep with 2 dogs in the house, my shotgun & with a 2’ square fan running all night to create ‘white noise’.

I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. I will never go back. The clean & neat single family houses today look like East LA. 5 cars parked on every lawn that was once well-tended & had flowers on the borders. LaBomba noise all night & day, no matter whom you asked to shut it down lower.

The 1994 earthquake only made it much worse. No one I knew when I lived there is still there.

Thank you for your post! I have been thinking for two days now that people who think Zimmerman is a racist are either suburbanites or rural people with no understanding of bad or changing neighborhoods. I, too, am a city person who has experienced 30 years worth of trouble from black and latino teens. Just to prove I’m not a racist, lol, last summer a Chinese nut case tried to push me into my NYC apartment corridor while I was standing on the stoop. And I don’t even live in a bad neighborhood! So I identify with Zimmerman. I, personally, would never have the guts to be a neighborhood watchdog.