Tactical Home Defense: Neighborhood Security
This short article is taken from our new Tactical Home Defense and Security book. The article discusses some points on how to establish a neighborhood level alert and response plan. We welcome your reactions, comments and ideas on our Facebook page and if you like the article, click below to check out the book on Amazon.
Tactical Home Defense: Neighborhood Security
No security measure is a magical forcefield that actively protects you from threats. The best alarm system in the world doesn’t provide any security if there is no one to respond to the alarm. The most heavily fortified door is most likely useless if the threat has an unlimited amount of time to find a way to break through it. Owning a powerful firearm and spending countless hours training with it will not do any good if an intruder finds you fast asleep in your bed and your weapon is in another room.
In order for security to be effective, three elements need to come together simultaneously: alert, hardening and response. First is the alert system. An alert system might be an alarm system, a neighborhood watch, a pet, a combination of all three or any number of other alert devices. The alert system will notify you when there is a threat or a potential threat. The alert system usually works in conjunction with physical obstacles and the measures you take to harden your home. Installing a door with a lock, means that you can connect an alarm that goes off when that door is opened. Placing a bolt on your door will force a threat to bang on your door or break a window in order to enter, which will wake up your guard dog who will then bark and alert you to the threat.
Thus, alerts systems and obstacles/hardening typically work in conjunction. The third element is the response. The response could be police arriving on scene or it could be you or other family members engaging the threat yourself with a personally owned weapon. In any case, it is important to integrate your alert system with your physical obstacles and threat response plan. This article will discuss a few points on how to integrate a neighborhood level alert system with a community response plan.
Layers of Alert Systems
When establishing and emplacing alert systems, it can be helpful to think of them in terms of layers. The more layers of alert systems you have and the farther out they reach, the more early warning you will have of an incoming threat. Multiple layers of alert systems also decrease the chances that a threat will pass through undetected. The picture below shows a neighborhood (blue outline) and your personal property (green outline) within that neighborhood. The red outline shows the exterior wall of your family dwelling. You can incorporate different types of alert systems into each of these three zones. While your neighborhood, property and home may differ from the example in various ways, in most cases the fundamental principles of security remain the same.
Contact Roster and Grid Reference Graphic
Maintaining good communication between residents in a neighborhood is essential for effective security. In some cases, people do not even know their next-door neighbor’s phone number. This can cause serious problems in an emergency situation. What if you are away from home and a child or older relative calls you for help? Wouldn’t it be helpful to be able to reach out to a neighbor to assist right away? What If you detect a possible prowler but lose sight of the threat behind a neighbor’s house? Wouldn’t you want to warn the neighbor and ask them what they see? By establishing a “common operating picture” within your neighborhood you can greatly enhance your security and alert capabilities. One way to do this is by establishing a document like the one below and sharing it with your neighborhood. The document includes a phone roster of everyone in the neighborhood and depicts where each person’s house is with a number. There is also an alphanumeric grid to help neighbors communicate possible threats. You might call a neighbor and ask them if they see a threat in the vicinity of grid H10. That is much easier than trying to describe a location, especially at night.
Redundant Alert Plans
After improving communications in your neighborhood and creating some shared documents like call rosters or GRGs, it is important to actually talk with your neighbors, get to know them, and agree upon some prearranged emergency signals. You may divide up the phone roster and assign each neighbor to call three others in an emergency that affects the entire neighborhood. You might plan to contact specific neighbors with law enforcement or medical experience depending on the situation. What if there is an emergency and your phone does not work? It would be helpful to have a whistle or airhorn to alert neighbors of the emergency. Having established a prearranged signal (three blasts for emergency etc.) the neighbors can then call the police even if you cannot. When establishing alerts, it is important to test them. As shown in the diagram below the sound of a whistle or air horn might only travel so far. It is also important to have electronic alarms (marked in blue) that are quick to trigger and directly alert a security company or local law enforcement. These are just a few examples of how to set up an alert plan within your neighborhood. There is no single best way to do this, the important thing is to think through it, discuss it with your neighbors and test it to make sure it works.
Personal Communications Plan
You should also ensure you have multiple, redundant communications within your own home. Ideally you should have four levels: primary, alternate, contingency and emergency. Study the diagram below for an example. It can be helpful to have cordless land-line phones and even wired phones in case cell reception goes down. Giving each family member a radio (walkie-talkie) can allow you to communicate with your family while calling the police on another line. If you have an alarm system, you should be able to manually trigger the alarm from several points throughout the house. You should have backup alert and communications devices placed in strategic locations so you can get to them in an emergency. Everyone in the family must know where these devices are and you must test them and practice using them regularly.
Neighborhood Emergency Response Plan
In some cases, local law enforcement will be too far away to respond quickly enough in an emergency. When you are making your defense plan and laying out your timeline, you might find that no matter how many sensors or obstacles you emplace, you cannot realistically slow an intruder down long enough for police to arrive. In this case you must find other ways to respond to the threat. Even if police are close by, it is still a good idea to develop neighborhood response capabilities and procedures. One of the most basic involves highlighting the names and houses of certain individuals in your neighborhood on your GRG. In the example below, individuals with law enforcement, military or combat/weapons experience are highlighted in blue whereas individuals with medical experience are highlighted in red. If you yourself are not skilled or confident with a firearm, a skilled neighbor might be able to come to the rescue in a very short time window. As just mentioned, these designated neighborhood responders should coordinate with local law enforcement as much as possible to prevent confusion and accidents. If you do develop this sort of neighborhood response, the more planning you can conduct the better. Planning might include ensuring responders have a binder with all of the neighborhood home floorplans and defense plans. If an emergency takes place in a given house, the responder can pull the laminated floorplan of the same number and immediately know the family’s planned escape routes and hide locations. This is just one example of a planning measure that might mitigate risk in an emergency.
We hope you found the short article useful and once again we welcome your reactions, comments or suggestions on our Facebook page where we frequently hold constructive discussions on tactics with people from various tactical backgrounds and experience levels. Also, click below if you would like to check out the full book on Amazon.
