I love it when a plan comes together

Ok, I have watched the original A-Team in the past. Anyway, we had our first neighborhood watch meeting last night, and the woman from the office of public safety brought along the assistant precinct commander and 2 detectives who work in our area.

I have to say how thrilled and proud I am of my little neighborhood. It's small, only 51 houses, and we packed that room with representation from maybe 50% of the homes. There are other people who want to be involved, but were unable to attend. The asst. precinct commander said he hadn't been to one of these that had so many men there in a long time too.

One of our residents had been emailing a local tv station for some time now, and while I was at work my co-coordinator Rosa called me and said the reporter wanted to interview us at 4 p.m. WTF?! Neither one of us had known this other person had contacted the media, and quite honestly I don't want to be on tv. I was on once when I was about 18, and I know I sounded like a complete idiot. I must admit that the station that wanted to do the interviewing is one that always finds the most ignorant person they can to make a statement about whatever it is that has happened. Exploitative. I said no, that she could do it if she wanted, but I would have nothing to do with it. I wasn't going to help them fill their useless 1 hour newscast. I said a lot of other stuff too that surprised me coming out of my mouth. (I had no idea that I had some of these latent conservative types of feelings, but then again, it wasn't The News Hour who wanted to interview us either.) Perhaps most importantly, public speaking is not my forte, and being filmed for a potential filler spot or human interest story would make my nervousness much worse. Rosa called me later and said she had taken care of it.

The reporter also called the woman at the ofc of public safety, who then proceeded to call Keith to find out what was going on. Honestly, all of us were caught off guard with this. I later found out that the news station involved is doing pieces on communities that are working together for improvements. However, I personally feel like we as a community need to start working together, along with our local government, to handle these crimes of opportunity that have been happening here. I don't need or want (at this time) an inflammatory news station to be involved. The interesting thing is that Rosa thought doing the interview would be a great idea. Honestly, she could have done it without me, and I wouldn't have minded a bit. I personally feel that we do need to work within the channels available to us first and give them time to work. A reporter is out for a story, and the story is better with controversy, and I personally think that reporters can be intrusive and antagonistic (look at Princess Di.) We will get better results if we can work together in a cooperative atmosphere. If we're not getting the results we want, we can always go to local media later.

Can you tell I wasn't at all happy about this? So I think we're going to be able to have this meeting quietly, but as we're leaving to get to the church, there's a guy filming our street sign. Later, at the church, the cameraman and reporter showed up. The room we're in is small, and our group is large and spilling into the hallway. The cameraman tries to come in with that giant camera, and Rosa asked him to leave since it was disruptive. He was snippy with her, but he left. They hung around and questioned some of the residents as they were leaving. I don't know how many they spoke to, nor do I really care. All I know is that I was able to get in front of the group without totally freaking out from the stress of public speaking. I am very excited about it, and now we know a lot more about what the police department needs from us to help them to help us.

There's a lot more work ahead for us. Will I ever get time to knit again? This week has been slim on the knitting time, and next week doesn't look much better for me.

Gratuitous cat picture