Neighbourhood Watch

The Neighbourhood Watch scheme can help to prevent crime in your local area.

It's the best known and effective example of people working together to prevent crime. The scheme makes neighbourhoods safer and improves people's quality of life. People involved include the police, public agencies like the council, and members of the community.

In the UK today, there are over 161,000 Neighbourhood Watch schemes in operation. Over 10 million people directly benefit from them.  

Neighbourhood Watch schemes

Help to reduce crime by: 

• addressing issues of social cohesion and community safety in their area to reduce crime/fear of crime
• are independent and self reliant but use their connection with the police and councils to improve community safety  
• assist the police and the community as a recognised consultative group
• are linked to the South Yorkshire Neighbourhood Watch Association (SYNWA)
• appoint from themselves an area co-ordinator. They meet formally during the year. The outcome of the meeting is confirmed to the SYNWA together with the number of homes covered. This enables them to audit the number of properties covered by each scheme.
• are recognised by the police and councils as organised bodies. They'll be involved in consultation about crime/fear of crime, road safety, public nuisance, and other similar issues.

South Yorkshire Neighbourhood Watch

There are 3,500 Neighbourhood Watch schemes in South Yorkshire. They involve over 100,000 households throughout the county. We help groups to set up Neighbourhood Watch across South Yorkshire to make our area a safer place to live.

We put them in touch with groups that can help their needs. These include South Yorkshire Police and the community officers (PCSOs), local council liaison workers, TARAs, housing associations etc.

We now have different schemes to suit different needs:

• school watch
• allotment watch
• park watch
• play watch
• rural watch
• business/shop watch
• Trans Pennine Trail watch