As Eastern Standard Time has finally come, nightfall comes earlier too. We go about our everyday schedules assuming all is well. Our children return home from school, parents return from work and shoppers are still bustling about.
Although life goes on, we need to be extra vigilant of our surroundings. Criminal opportunists think they are imperceptible in the evening hours and they may actually be right in some way. After committing a crime, they can disappear into the night, leaving a victim vulnerable and panicked.
Below are a few tips to ensure your children’s safety as well as your own.
*When walking home from school, children should choose their routes carefully. They should walk on WELL LIT blocks and/or heavily populated streets.
*Children riding bikes home from school need to ensure they have the proper amount of safety reflectors. Review the rules of riding bikes in the street and ALWAYS wear proper protection, especially a HELMET..
*Children, teens and adults should not walk with their iPods, mp3 players or cell phones attached to their ears. Not only is it a distraction to their surroundings, it also makes them an unsuspecting target for theft.
*Women carrying handbags or the like should make sure it is worn close to the body or held in a secure manner. Straps of a handbag should not be worn around your neck. Keep it zipped closed so as not to attract pickpockets.
*Be vigilant of the people around you and use proper judgment to keep yourself safe. If something or someone seems amiss then don’t hesitate to call for help. Remember, safety first!
*When parking your vehicle, try to park in a well lit area. Make sure not to leave any indicia of valuables secured therein. Signs which criminals look for are: suction cup marks on the windshield, bags left on or under seats, wires running to the electric outlet and loose change. A $5 pair of sunglasses can cost you a $150 window.
Wishing all our friends a safe winter – The Flatbush Shomrim Safety Patrol.
(YWN Desk – NYC)
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5 Responses
You are aware that the length of the day and night at any given time is determined by Ha-Shem (okay, the goyim would say “nature”), and the clock adjustments are irrelevant. If you want, for example, year round Daylight time just get up an hour later every day during Standard time.
It is NOT irrelevant for the purpose this article is talking about. If you leave your job or school at 5 pm, for example, you used to come home with plenty of day light until this past sunday when the time was changed.
#2- so start work earlier (and go to work in the dark)
Daylight Savings in new. Use of clocks isn’t much older (until recently everyone used the sorts of hours we use for calculating davening times based on dividing the daylight into 12 hours whose length varied throughout the year)
If you can’t take it, move to someplace along the equator such as Kenya or Indonesia or Northern Brazil, and you won’t have the problem.
akuperma, I think you missed the point of the article (btw, did you even read it or just saw the title and skip to the comments?). We live in a place that changes the clock to DST. Noone is complaining. Now that we changed the clock, and most people keep the same schedual, there is “more” time for crimanals to do crimes.
Shomrim is not telling people to change around there lives, JUST BE AWARE AND CAREFUL.
If you want to wake up earlier or move to some other country, go right ahead. Enjoy!
DO NOT POST!
Mods, can you correct “DST” to “EST” in my above post. Thanks! Your the greatest!
DO NOT POST!