On your way home from a long day at work, thinking about how you hold your purse or whether you activated your car alarm may not be as important as anticipating getting home, relaxing on your living room sofa and taking off your shoes before dinner. Unfortunately, it is these little actions that can save you from being a victim of a crime.
The residents of Riviera Towers on Boulevard East in West New York now know what to look for to prevent a crime thanks to a crime prevention seminar held in their lobby by the West New York Police Department on April 26.
“The most important thing we learned was how to recognize the possibility of danger,” said resident Bruce Kline, who requested the seminar after attending a similar one with his wife. “We have a mixed group of people living here. We have senior citizens and other people that sometimes forget safety when they walk down the streets.”
According to West New York Police Captain Michael Caliguiro, who presented the seminar, the department has been doing these seminars on request since the department started its crime prevention program in 1977.
“[The seminar] touches on all subjects in crime safety,” said Caliguiro. He said it covers how to safeguard your property, burglary and robbery prevention, assault prevention and avoiding dangerous strangers. “We teach ways to make yourself less vulnerable to criminal activity.”
Lowering the crime rate
Caliguiro credits the town’s residents for the decrease that the town has seen in crime in the past three years. “West New York has had a dramatic decrease in crime in the past three years,” said Caliguiro, adding that the crime rate has gone down by more than 40 percent.
“I always say that the most important tools in crime prevention are the telephone and the citizen,” added Caliguiro, who graduated from the Louisville Southern Police Institute in Kentucky with a certificate in Crime Prevention in 1977. “It is only through the cooperation of our citizens that we are able to get results.”
Caliguiro said that auto theft is probably the most common crime in West New York. Caliguiro told people at the seminar to make sure that people lock their car doors, remember to take their keys and activate their car alarms. One of the surest ways to prevent a crime from happening is to make yourself aware of your surroundings and the people in them, he said.
“We learned many things that you wouldn’t have thought of,” said Kline, who added that looking a person in the eye rather than averting one’s stare is an example of how to avoid a dangerous stranger.
“It is a good feeling afterward,” said Kline. “Like you know something that you didn’t know before.”