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Joshua Brown
Back in 2012 there was a woman who bought a fourplex in a shitty part of my town, she was a tiny Vietnamese woman, maybe 100 lbs wet and over 50 years old with 10+ miscarriages. She had grown up in a Vietnamese orphanage and told stories about having to eat rats to survive. She was a scrapper and had risen among the community to be a powerful financial force in partnership with her husband. She determined to make the neighborhood great again.
She bought a big dog, moved into one of the units to start remodeling and walked the dog a couple times a day. She chased out drug dealers, she gained local noteriety among the other landlords and ultimately cleaned up nearly a 5 block radius around her complex, raising the standard of living of bother her tenants as well as the neighbors who literally did nothing to deserve it. The graffiti and drug litter vanished, the human trafficking disappeared and the infrastructure began to emerge, unused sidewalks began to uncover, broken lights were repaired for use again and everyone benefited.
1. Make your Neighboring Neighborhood Great Again
If you start directly in your neighborhood, you open yourself up to serious blowback if you push too far. Caring deeply about a place among people that don’t care about it nearly as much opens you up to problems, people complaining, people calling police on you, people seeing you everyday and knowing your intimate daily activities. It’s fine to do and I’ve done it, but it can be a pain, especially in the era of Nextdoor gossips.
So start practicing with a neighborhood that is not too far away but also isn’t literally your backyard.
There is a famous quote I heard and think of, which, although contextually different, applies: “Don’t shit where you eat.”
Now remember, this is a sliding scale. For example, when you have no assets, you can draw in and consider it maybe 2 streets over. Walking takes a long time but it’s reasonable to consider that you will draw considerably less attention by being a pedestrian and being a neighborhood watch asset than being in a car or truck or some other difficult to miss transportation device.
2. Maintain corporate neutrality but not moral ambiguity.
My first assumption is that the local police have good guys and bad guys. My goal is to signal good intentions to the good guys and keep the bad guys wondering what I’m up to. This is important at an instinctual level, whether I report something that is suspicious to the local LEO gang, to my own OSINT community, to the press (god help me if I ever have to do that), or just note things for my own reference.
I don’t necessarily want to promise myself to report every single thing to any particular group or person because it might be a pattern of behavior that they can be leveraged on or I might be labeled unnecessarily as a liability to some unknown actor who is acting in concert with my vibe, not my plans or promises.
Remember, in communication, philosophy is key. Just because someone calls their enemies “terrorists” doesn’t mean that the cubicle one over isn’t filled by someone with diametrically opposing political views who needs solidarity to build a case against traffickers or fraudsters in the department.
3. Don’t LARP. Start small and build muscle.
Observing and writing reports, documenting events and learning technology are all muscles that must be built and to stay safe it is important to not roleplay. Take this endeavor deadly seriously.
Practice each of the aspects of neighborhood watch, think about the consequences if you do something wrong. For example, push your limits of trespass so that you understand deeply why or why not trespass is a valid. I’m not advocating doing criminal trespass, but in most cases, walking through an empty lot with a valid reason (don’t larp, actually have a reason) and casually observing graffiti, abandoned cars, broken locks, fencing openings, etc is a perfectly legit way to build your internal vibe of which types of properties are being politically squatted and which ones owners take pride in and therefore you want to respect them and not be in their space unnecessarily.
But fear is often just that, an excuse. So take action, build your experience by doing things that might seem socially unacceptable but in a solid philosophical state of calm and intentionality.
4. Privacy is a myth
If you want to be a tool of surveillance, you yourself must be transparent. Tinted windows, using fake names, refusing to talk to people etc are all signals of “otherness”.
In a tribe, you know every detail about someone’s life: their parents, their partners, their home address, their religious fervor, their accent, their addictions. If you want to build the skills and muscle of deeply understanding a place, whether your direct neighborhood or the neighborhood over, it is important to develop the skill of transparency. You do not need to be weird and offer more information than someone is asking for, but you will offer an olive branch to a curious security guard by not having tinted windows. This is not to manipulate them or dissuade them from enforcing their own codes or policies, rather it is a threat to actual criminal elements because their decidedly anti-transparency will be highlighted because you decided to be open and forthright from the very beginning.
Sunglasses, hoodies, non-descript “gray man” clothing, not carrying ID, etc are all things that raise flags as far as good and bad. Bad actors will recognize and gravitate towards you because they will view you as a useful distraction or guinea pig to pin a crime onto you because, if you look like you are blending in, it may be easier for them to model your behavior and stick a different crime on you.
5. Understanding terrain
In a military or police scenario, you might look at a property and think “no complaints, not my problem” because terrain in those contexts is real and in your face. From a new paradigm, you have to understand that this is a spiritual war, and by that I mean a gut instinct war, not against demons like some type of flitting about moth with fangs, but rather that there are systems, families, patterns, histories, stories and “d-a-e-mons” daemons (scripts, programs) that are running through the environment. Your neighborhood has thousands of people who have done all sorts of things and the effects of their actions begins to leak out into the environment.
Litter, graffiti, abandoned cars, broken windows, UTP camps, gangs on corners, dirty equipment, sex or human trafficking symbols, etc
These are all part of the terrain that you will learn from repeatedly exposing yourself to them. You are in danger if you become their enemy to their face. Learn their patterns, maintain dignity for the humans involved that are not actively committing crimes or that you don’t have evidence did commit a crime.
There is an old quote I learned as a child “You catch more flies with honey than vinegar.”
Often these problems are extensions of other problems and if you observe patiently you will start to make connections that a head on collision with an issue would have missed.
Perhaps a graffiti artist works for the company and the floor manager is friends with him, but the owner is staging a long process to get him fired for defacing the company property without permission. I don’t know, but that is part of thinking and pausing. Sure sometimes taking immediate and direct action, for example calling the police on a newly crashed car you find in an alley may be the best course of action, but before you do at least entertain what some possible alternatives might be. Think about the terrain you’re dealing with.
6. Gangs
In most scenarios outside of jail or prison, gangs are a larp. They are often young men who are being used by older men to fulfill fantasies of violence or conquest. It is fleeting and vapid, but is is very real. Which is why I recommend trusting your gut. Especially with the police. You DO NOT KNOW what gang infiltration into the local police has happened and anything that is not being documented through phone logs or your own recordings, I would be hesitant to purposefully engage in.
You can call the cops, sure, but most of the time, it is quite unnecessary to stick around and interact with a cop in person. Let them succumb to the boring idiocy of bureaucracy and note-taking and simply move on to the next part of your walk or drive.
7. Time of day
Go through your patrol at different times of day, you may find different breadcrumbs to crime and fraud by changing your pace or patterns. Take a good flashlight if you are going in the dark.
8. Sounds
I like to make sounds that announce my presence, being a surprise to anyone, especially a criminal is the last thing I want to do. Obviously being quiet can get you intel on things that you can’t see, but it’s pretty rare and most daemons (scripts, programs) that people get caught up in (drugs, trafficking, violence) often are impulsive and uncontrolled so they are often noisy even if you yourself are as well.
9. Finish
Do something that you can finish. I have worked a neighborhood for several years now and I have fixed things that the police department and paid security guards have not been able to. Well-placed decisions to report or not, changing directions, times of day, transportation type, reasons for being in the area, etc have all contributed to some overwhelming results that I’m proud of and I’m not sure anyone will ever know who I am or what I accomplished for the community. But I know and now you do too.
Be safe, be smart, be open, be brave.
#nonfiction #security #safety #crime #policing #communitypolice
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📅 Published February 22, 2026
📍 Written in Aurora, Colorado along the West Toll Gate Creek at Joshua's home.
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Early on my excuses for being in the area ranged from: going to work, doing street photography, mapping for OpenStreetMap, going to Costco to get a chicken bake. Now I just assume everyone thinks I'm supposed to be there because I kind of am. And if anyone wants to put me in touch with a big dog from ProLogis, please, that would be a fun collab.
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