The Watchers of Westgate

For some reason city leaders are cheering these psychos.

How the neighborhood watch in Westgate no doubt sees themselves.

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The worst kept secret in Columbus right now is the police won’t respond to any emergency call that doesn’t involve a dead body.

Police say this is due to them having to respond to the serious calls like shootings, stabbings, robberies and assaults. Sure, they may respond but that’s about all they’ll do.

Consider earlier this month when some maniac unleashed a murder machine on a crowd at Park Street Patio, resulting in four people being shot. The act was caught on tape and yet nobody has been apprehended in the case.

Three weeks later, there was a mass shooting at Bicentennial Park in downtown, which statistically is the safest place in Columbus. Five people were shot and a 16-year-old girl was slain a mere .25 miles from the police precinct across the bridge in Franklinton.

Again, the act was caught on tape as a chilling reminder that cops do absolutely nothing to prevent crime and yet the boys in blue haven’t arrested anybody. It makes me wonder how they justify their $334 million budget if they can’t even catch murderers who were caught on tape. But that’s a discussion for another day.

The effects of the spike in violent crime that’s happening across gun-saturated America right now are trickling down to Westgate, the aspiring Clintonville of the West Side.

Residents there are apparently fed up with their inability to call police to harrass unhoused people doing drugs at Westgate Park and other suspicious characters that they deem unworthy of traversing their streets. So they did the next best thing, band together on social media to form a panopticon surveillance system that eyes everybody that enters or leaves their neighborhood.

From Eric Lagatta of dispatch.com:

As its membership has grown, Westgate Watch has established an intricate security surveillance network that allows the group to track suspects and crimes through a “camera collective” that delivers real-time information — suspect descriptions and vehicle makes, model, and license plates — to neighbors, and documents evidence of crime for law enforcement. More than 200 members have surveillance systems for monitoring the neighborhood's many alleyways and side streets, said Kelly McKinney, an original member who often assists other members in installing home security systems.

Not too long ago, the group was able to share surveillance footage to piece together the movements of a suspected hit-and-run driver in a stolen vehicle they say led to an arrest. More recently, they've been tracking a group of youths who they say have been terrorizing the neighborhood by shooting at passersby with paintball guns.

“Nobody can leave our neighborhood or come into our neighborhood without us knowing exactly how they came into our neighborhood and how they left,” said McKinney, who has lived in Westgate with his wife, Mary, since 2005. “We have actually worked very vigilantly to increase and maintain a better quality of life and our community really rallies around that."

This is what happens when people spend too much time on neighborhood apps like NextDoor or Citizen. They feel they live in crime-infested neighborhoods after they realize the cops don’t give a shit about 99% of crime. Then they develop a Batman Complex because we have been trained from a very young age to worship at the altar of private property.

These freaks live in an urban area and think they are entitled to know the personal history of anybody that traverses through their neighborhood. They spend their days doing this and the best they have to show for it is tipping off the cops to a hit-and-run driver and unsuccessfully hunting a gang of rowdy teenagers who are shooting people with paintball guns?

The way out of their problem isn’t through more police presence and removing port-a-potties from public parks. City Council won’t help them either because none of them live in Westgate so they have no true advocate in the halls of power just like every other neighborhood on the West Side.

Set up needle-exchange programs and needle-dump boxes. Stop treating sex workers like criminals. Pick up other people’s trash and take some pride in your neighborhood that goes beyond asking every shady character for their papers and spending your days complaining on social media to people who don’t care. I promise you that finding and disposing of a syringe on the ground is not the end of the world.

Drugs and crime are just part of life in the Big City. If these wannabe vigilantes are too fragile to handle that simple face, then feel free to sell your house and move to the suburbs where you’ll fit right in with people who only feel comfortable living around people that look, talk and act exactly like themselves. The West Side will be fine without your tears.

THOSE WMDs. Cops don’t belong at Pride… Before I played basketball at UCONN and in the NBA, I spent time in solitary confinement and know how damaging it can be… The history of why we eat bad food… The biggest wastes of time we regret when we get older… What would happen if the world stopped shopping?