Getting to Know Your Neighbors Is Community Defense: Lessons from NYC Block Watch
Brooklyn, NY. July 2, 2025.
In April 2025, we launched a new coalition of mutual aid groups and community defense groups called NYC Block Watch. In NYC Block Watch, we educate each other on cop counter-surveillance and community defense in order to create and support local rapid response networks. This includes learning about police techniques, intervention tactics, self-defense, and ways to support arrestees and detainees in jail and at court.
NYC Block Watch has been leading dozens of workshops for tenant associations, community centers, mutual aid groups, self-defense groups, community gardens, and block associations. We've led workshops on how to monitor cop or ICE activity, know your rights, de-arresting, spotting undercover cops, bystander intervention tactics, and how to build a rapid response network.
Download our zine "You Can Start A Rapid Response Network": https://bit.ly/RapidResponseZine
On July 1, we hosted our first in-person coalition meeting at a location in Central Brooklyn. The mood was electric. Around 30 neighbors attended, primarily from Central Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan, including neighbors from the Crown Heights Tenant Union, Food Not Bombs, Club A, NYC Court Watch, Interference Archive, Crown Heights Mutual Aid, Brooklyn Jail Support, NYC ICE Watch, and the DSA Anti-War Working Group.
We discussed upcoming workshops, including a planned conversation with a large network of cultural art workers from across the boroughs to discuss threat modeling for ICE raids at community events. We shared some of the common questions we receive at workshops: If ICE breaks the law, what recourse do people have? How do we push the law to its limit in our favor? Folks who attend our workshops are interested in “non-legal” trainings—people want tools to intervene, not just observe.
Attendees shared updates about what they have noticed in their neighborhoods around immigration. Fear and unverified reports are keeping people from going to hospitals or schools. There have been two recent unverified ICE sightings in Crown Heights in the past few months. Recently, ICE attempted to access a Crown Heights Tenant Union building by impersonating HPD. ICE has tried to access schools (like PS 139), but has so far been denied entry.
ICE is focusing more on targeting people in court settings—possibly because community defense has been so effective elsewhere. There's a national hotline that can support moving court appearances to virtual, but only if the person has a lawyer: 888-462-5211. We still lack strong preparation protocols for when detentions do occur.
Interrupting detentions requires hyperlocal relationships + widespread shared information-sharing between different networks. This is the organizing challenge ahead of us. Attendees suggested deepening our existing relationships with faith-based organizations. One neighbor recommended: "Just get to know your neighbors." He shared that planting trees led to his block association: they organized a petition to plant more trees on the block; that contact list became the organizing base for his block association.
Big moves ahead. We are planning for bigger meetings and specialized working groups to share strategies, potentially with a spokescouncil structure of representatives rooted in their buildings and blocks who can help coordinate across neighborhoods.
Building toward increased militancy means not only being ready to respond to ICE raids and emergency situations, but also proactively creating systems of care and defense through community watch and rapid response networks. Relationship building is how we train each other, protect each other, and grow our capacity to fight and win.
Monthly meetings -- in person -- first Tuesday of every month.
Next Meeting: Tuesday, August 5th.
Email nycblockwatch@proton.me / text 347-486-4688 / sign up at https://nycblockwatch.carrd.co/ to RSVP for the location of the next meeting.