Safety Initiatives
About the Courtesy Program
One of the challenges of living in rental communities, can be unruly neighbors, unsupervised children, or unavailable parking spaces.
These nuisances become even greater when they occur in the evening or on weekends when the rental office is closed. The Courtesy Program is available at these times to assist residents with customer service needs.
The Courtesy Program Staff addresses the problem immediately, calms the situation, provides customer service and alleviates the need for the reporting resident to call law enforcement.
The Courtesy Program assists property owners in maintaining high quality rental complexes while providing an additional amenity that attracts prospective tenants to rent and encouraging current residents to stay.
Services
The Courtesy Program provides a variety of services, including:
- Addressing nuisance calls from residents
- Accompanying residents to and from their vehicles
- Enforcing resident parking rules and monitoring parking lots
- Helping carry packages and groceries for residents
- Promoting and supervising community activities
- Acting as a liaison with the city police and fire department
- Alerting the property management to maintenance needs – non-functioning lights, broken windows and jammed door locks
- Assisting residents who have been locked out of their apartments thus avoiding the need for on-call maintenance
Statistics
But most importantly, the Courtesy Program works! At Garden View Apartments in New Brighton, where the Courtesy Program began in 2000, there were 537 crime calls to the New Brighton Police Department in that year. This made the property responsible for 10% of the total number of police calls in the city during that year alone. Since then, through the onsite Courtesy Program, as well as strong collaborative partnerships between property management, the New Brighton Police Department and our agency, police calls to Garden View Apartments in 2016 had decreased to only 87. That’s an 84% decrease!
A similar situation can be seen at Ames Lake Neighborhood on St. Paul’s Eastside where the Courtesy Program began in 2006. In 2006, there were 318 police calls to the Saint Paul Police Department. Thanks to the Courtesy Program and partnerships withproperty management and police department, 2016 saw only 137 police calls resulting in a 57% decrease from 10 years earlier.
Contact
To learn more about the Courtesy Program, contact: Perry Lofquist at [email protected] or 612-805-1296.