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GREENSBORO — From Aug. 14 to Sept. 14 , the New Irving Park neighborhood had an average of one home break-in every other day.

That’s 16 reported burglaries in 32 days. There were six in June and three in July.

Although residents say police have been helpful in trying to stem the outbreak in the well-off neighborhood, homeowners have decided to take up for themselves.

Nearly 150 residents packed the front lawn of Erik and Jenny Kiser’s Round Hill Road home Monday to discuss revitalizing a community watch program.

“I think people were getting tired of things that were going on,” Jenny Kiser said. There have been car break-ins by night and home break-ins by day, but nobody has seen anything.

“We were trying to take a stand,” she said.

The neighbors discussed posting more community-watch signs, having regular meetings, organizing the large area into smaller sections and assigning block and street captains.

They are also taking more immediate steps such as snapping photographs of suspicious vehicles and writing down license plates.

That’s what police, especially Sgt. Charles Blaylock of the central division’s Community Resource Team, want residents to do.

“We really need citizens to be our eyes and ears,” Blaylock said. “They need to be willing to call.”

Six community resource officers cover the entire district, he said.

New Irving Park is a large area tucked between West Cone Boulevard on the south, North Elm Street on the east, Pisgah Church Road on the north and Lawndale Drive on the west.

Then there’s the issue of response time. Police are frequently pulled away from the neighborhood because of high -priority crimes in other areas. “We get bounced all over, and that’s the unfortunate thing for citizens at New Irving Park,” Blaylock said.

Residents can take measures to deter or delay burglars until the police arrive by increasing the protection of their homes, he said.

He advises that homeowners use deep-reaching deadbolt locks on doors and replace short screws with longer ones that go into the door frame, not just the structure of it.

Neighborhood resident Kim Forman is the liaison between Blaylock and the rest of the neighborhood. She moderates the neighborhood watch’s Yahoo Internet group, which has hundreds of members. The group distributes information on fun events such as Easter egg hunts and more serious events, such as burglaries.

“Basically I get information from neighbors and inform police about suspicious vehicles, suspicious things that they see,” she said. “What happened at a break-in? Did they come in from the front door, back door? Was anybody home?”

Forman said the death of 26-year-old neighbor Regan Bailey last year mobilized people.

“Police say that our best defense is looking out for each other because they can’t be everywhere,” she said. “And it’s true.”

Another resident, Jennifer Brooks, helped organize a meeting at Mendenhall Middle School ’s gymnasium a week after Bailey was found dead in her Willoughby Boulevard home. Many break-ins had occurred before that homicide, she said.

“We probably should have been watching out for each other better,” she said. “As a result of that, we decided to get together and start a community watch.”

But the neighborhood is so large that it’s hard to gather all of the residents in one place. It’s difficult to organize and nearly impossible for everyone to know their neighbors.

“We mainly tried to get people to break it down into smaller areas,” she said. “In some areas, it’s worked really well and in others, it hasn’t.”

There’s also another problem: apathy. When crime spikes, people become involved, she said. When it’s not spiking, people become uninterested.

Anne Givan ’s home was one of the nine burglarized this month. The recent rash of break-ins has jolted residents into action, she said.

“I think that the neighborhood has finally woken up and realized that we have to be precautionary, rather than reactionary,” she said.

Contact Dioni L. Wise at 373-7090 or dioni.wise@news-record.com