PLEASE DON'T MISREAD MY COMMENTS AS THE OP's.... I AM NOT LOOKING TO SETUP A NEIGHBORHOOD SWAT TEAM....
woody....
I remember that thread. It would be a pretty unlikely thing that a confrontation would happen... first of all, we would be in our cars. Second all we would do was log suspicious activity and call dispatch. So, a confrontation would have to mean we are approached in our vehicle and could not get away, and I do not see how that could even happen... but, as we all know anything is possible. So, lets say we see some kids... park a safe distance and note the number of kids, description and what they are doing while calling it in to the sheriff's dispatch... lets say that they see us doing that and pull a gun on us while approaching faster then we can retreat and we fired back... that is the type of scenario I am talking about. If something that far fetched were to happen, while doing a neighborhood watch would we have an even further uphill battle then your run-of-the-mill justified shooting... if there is such a thing.
The way our current sheriff patrol is handicapped, it takes a credible complaint to get the on-call supervisor paged and dispatched. Our hopes are that by including the department from day one and letting them train us on what to do and not to do that we will be looked upon as credible when we call. We just want to be able to feel safe at night and we want the kids and bad guys to know that even though the local LEO's are not budgeted to patrol our area at night that we, the citizens are.