About the Program

What is Block Watch?

Block Watch is a very successful crime prevention program, designed to keep neighbourhoods safer. When municipalities and police form partnerships with their communities and employ the Block Watch program, it can help reduce residential crime, it provides a stronger sense of safety for everyone and helps build stronger and connected communities.

Objectives of Block Watch

The main objective of the Block Watch Society of BC is to partner with communities to build safer neighbourhoods by encouraging residents to take a proactive approach to crime prevention and safety. Through education on target hardening, property marking, recognizing, and reporting suspicious activity, Block Watch provides a means for the community to take responsibility for its own safety by reducing the opportunity for crime.

Block Watch Member programs operate under the mandate of the Block Watch Society who in turn provide:

    • Support, training, mentoring and materials to police agencies and community programs

    • Coordinate and link community programs together

    • Provide ongoing training and sharing of best practices

    • Collaborate with police agencies to assist with problem solving, suggesting, and supporting strategies for positive change

    • Focus on reducing the risk of property crime – particularly residential and auto crime

Benefits of the Block Watch Program

 The active involvement and participation of citizens in a Block Watch program will:

    • Improve knowledge of security measures to better protect their home and property.

    • Recognize and encourage reporting of suspicious behaviour and activity to police.

    • Receive training to know how to identify suspects in crime mode and suspicious behaviour and report it more effectively

    • Provides direct access to an experienced crime prevention advocate

    • Increase trained volunteers to be the eyes and ears for the community and the police.

    • Create opportunities to improve community connections.

    • Discount offered on home insurance premium through some carriers.

As part of the Block Watch program, citizens will receive training on how to recognize and report suspicious activity. If you are part of a Block Watch program, contact your local Block Watch program to sign up for your training session today!

Program Information and how it works

Block Watch Programs in British Columbia are under the governance of the Block Watch Society of British Columbia, an organization that provides direction, training, and materials to each member in the program.

Most Block Watch programs operating across the province are partnered with municipalities and police organizations. The Society has the sole license for the Program in BC.

The Program involves creating groups/blocks of residents who look out for each other and their neighbour’s home and property as if it were their own. The Program encourages members of the community to get to know their neighbours, connect with each other on a regular basis and in doing so create a sense of community, increase their level of awareness and willingness to prevent, and report crime and suspicious behaviour to the police. The police will not necessarily know what is happening unless residents and businesses report crime to police departments.

The Program Involves:

    • Engaging with community members to encourage residential neighbours to organize together for the purpose of addressing a crime or community problem in their neighbourhood through increased communication, surveillance, ownership, and guardianship of the neighbourhood.

    • Training Block Leads and Participants on strategic crime prevention techniques

    • Establishing a channel of communication between participants and the police for the purposes of sharing information about crime in the community, providing updates on crime trends in their area and encouraging the effective reporting of criminal and suspicious behaviour

    • Providing standardized signage for residences or neighbourhoods to indicate to potential offenders that the neighbourhood is committed to vigilant surveillance.

Block Watch programs are often combined with other crime prevention activities. These can include property security assessments (CPTED), target hardening techniques, property identification ideas, and suspect identification. Coordinators use the skills and principles of crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED), as well as crime prevention through social development and other problem-solving models and crime reduction strategies in educating the participants of the Program.

Block Watch in BC relies on Coordinators and Block Leads to function. The coordinator runs the program, often from within community safety offices. They build awareness for the program, recruit new Block Leads, train crime prevention groups on how to prevent crime and report crime or suspicious activity, keep the information of the enlisted blocks, leads, and participants, disseminate information and newsletters, and act as a conduit for the information from block watch programs to the police. The Block Leads are responsible for the recruitment of participants and are intended to be a point person between the participants and the coordinator.

In British Columbia, most Block Watch programs are established in a similar way:

    • Recruit Block Leads

    • Leads canvas the neighbourhood or complex for participants and establish their group

    • Coordinators train the participants

    • Leads hand in their list of participants to the Block Watch Office

    • Block Watch signs may be installed around the neighbourhood

Partnering with Police

To watch more about the benefits of Block Watch and the partnership between the community and the police and how this partnership works, check out the video below!

Block Watch Society of BC Trademark Logo Policy