We have had almost no crime in our Community since I joined in 2012.
Once, a friend and neighbor had a visitor from the city and he absent-mindedly left some cigarette butts in a common area. We approached them the following day and asked that they just clean them up. They did. That was the whole story.
Another time, some visitors got drunk and stole a bunch of candles from the gift shop at the petting zoo. We lost about $65 worth of products. We had a Community meeting and decided that maybe we should just staff the gift shop, put out testers of everything, and have the actually products kept behind the counter. Allowing people to try the products first has actually increased our revenue so we’re happy to have changed this process and not involved any law enforcement individuals.
As a community, we believe in crime but we don’t believe in people as criminals. So we don’t deal with law enforcement agents – whose primary function in society seems to be making criminals out of survivors.