By Steve Visser
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
ELLENWOOD, Ga. — A proverb says it takes a village to raise a child. Michelle McClearn says it also takes a village to catch a thief. Sometimes, she says, they are one and the same.
The Riverwalk Estates homeowner association president said a youthful burglary ring has plagued her neighborhood in Ellenwood. Neighbors suspected at least one local teen was involved and the other thieves scoped out the homes by befriending children who lived in them.
So McClearn liked the pitch she heard recently from Village Defense at the homeowner meeting about “real-time crime fighting.” The security business promises to combat crime by immediately e-mailing, texting and phoning neighbors when someone notifies it of a crime in progress, a kicked-in door or suspicious activity like someone casing a house or car.
“People are on their cell phones all the time,” she said. “This would be easy. I think it would be cheap, and I think it would be beneficial.”
The cost? Between $12 and $60 a year per person, depending on whether it’s an individual membership or part of a neighborhood association plan.
The benefit? A neighborhood more hazardous for criminals who depend on speed, anonymity and apathy for success.
The crown jewels? A neighbor who is alerted in time to be a witness to solve a crime or a decision by crooks to stay away. The company plasters the neighborhood with signs that warn crooks the neighborhood is watching and has organized against them.
The system works by reconnecting neighborhoods in which many people are strangers. If a resident spots a crime or suspicious activity, he or she would call 911 and then call Village Defense, whose answering service would send out the information to people in the network.
If residents are home, they can be on the lookout for, say, a specific car or person. At the very least, it immediately warns people about crime in their neighborhoods --- a trend in burglaries or car thefts --- so they can take measures to avoid being a victim.
Nathan Black, 24, partnered with Michael Daniely, 44, and Sharath Mekala, 31, to start Village Defense a year ago. All have beefs against criminals --- Black’s drums were stolen from his car, and Daniely’s and Mekala’s homes were burglarized.
For Black, a newly minted electrical engineer from Georgia Tech whose passion is music, the loss of his drum set was gut-wrenching.
“I had spent all those years building the set, modifying it and customizing it, and was very hurt by the loss,” he said. “I was equally upset when I found out my neighbor heard my car alarm going off at around 3 a.m., but thought nothing of it and therefore did nothing.”
Mekala broached the Village Defense idea after wondering how 700 people lived in his neighborhood and “yet no one knew anything about his door getting kicked in,” Black said.
Mekala was friends with Daniely, a member of the public safety advisory committee for neighborhoods in west Atlanta. Daniely saw real-time communication from a multitude of members as an enhancement of neighborhood watch programs that rely on volunteers.
Soon the business was hatched. Now they are working to make it fly. They are pitching metro Atlanta neighborhood associations, recently scheduling meetings from Sandtown to Snellville. They have a few fans.
“This is an excellent opportunity for communities to be organized so they can communicate quickly with one another when something is going down in the ‘hood, and I’m for whatever is good for the ‘hood,” said Janet Martin, a member of the network in west Atlanta, who works for the Fulton County district attorney’s office. “It’s all about communication. Burglars depend on one hand not knowing what the other hand is doing, but when the hands come together, they get smashed.”
Atlanta police stats show crime has fallen by 80 percent in the Sims Estates neighborhood in west Atlanta (dropping from 10 burglaries in 2009 to two in 2010 for a comparable time frame), where the system has been in use since February.
The problem is getting clients to buy in. People who attend neighborhood meetings are civic-minded, take-charge types. Other people are harder to motivate --- a problem for a network based on numbers.
So far, only 150 people have joined in six neighborhoods, paying $5 a month as individual members, and no associations are paying for the residents --- a main financial and security goal of the network. McClearn says Riverwalk Estates might be the first.
McClearn said her association has to decide whether it can come up with about $3,000 annually to provide the service to members --- although she thinks the service could encourage more people to pay their dues to the neighborhood association by giving them an immediate benefit.
Martin, who lives in the tight-knit Chalet-Peyton Woods neighborhood in west Atlanta, said she hopes her neighborhood association will eventually pay for the service out of dues. She was frustrated more people had not signed up.
“I said, ‘Many of you spend the cost of this program daily playing the lottery and you don’t win anything,’ ” she said.
She said a stranger recently woke her by knocking on her door at 3 a.m. The woman told Martin she was lost. Martin, who refused to open the door, called 911 and Village Defense. “I’m sure people weren’t happy getting the calls, but I wanted people to know there was someone knocking on doors and I didn’t want anybody to get hurt,” Martin said.
John Pavlin, who heads the public safety committee for the West End Neighborhood Association, said cost is a factor as well as commitment. “The system makes sense, but some people ... say they don’t want to get a text in the middle of the night,” he said.
Donald Jeanne, board president of the Reunion Place homeowner association, said he would like to contract with Village Defense.
He wasn’t sure if association dues, which came due at the beginning of the year, would be enough to cover the association’s projects and the fees for the alert service. Those fees for his neighborhood would be least $3,600 a year.
“I’m going to have to see how I can fit that into the budget,” he said. “It is going to be kind of tough.”
Jeff Doster of Sims Estates said the amount of rental property in a neighborhood can undercut participation since tenants aren’t active in homeowner associations. But Doster contends those who buy into the system won’t be disappointed.
State Farm was threatening to cancel his homeowner insurance because of his repeated burglaries --- losing three plasma TVs and one tube television along with a computer, 12 pairs of tube socks and a bottle of cologne, the 44-year-old said.
But things quieted down after the Village Defense signs announced the neighborhood was protected by cell phones. A drug dealer threatened a preacher in a nearby neighborhood who was advocating his neighbors join the network, Doster said.
Copyright 2010 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution