I lived in Detroit many years ago, and remember there was a period of time where young children were either being abducted or approached by an adult while walking to school. Community leaders organized a large protest, and hundreds of people spent several hours walking around waving signs and demanding police do something.

And I remember thinking at the time, the police are already doing what they can. It's not like police officers don't care about little kids. So if those parents had spent the same amount of time that they spent waving signs but instead organized themselves so that each neighborhood had a chaperone parent walk the kids to school each day, no more time would have been spent, but they would have actually solved the problem instead of just bitching about it.

Love the idea of creating your own safety net! Even if it's for safety against the publicly available one...