DUTCHTOWN, Mo. — Safety is something that's top of mind for everyone, no matter where you live.
One South City neighborhood is taking matters into its own hands to help deter crime.
Caya Aufiero, Dutchtown Community Improvement District Chairperson, said people are first and foremost interested in safety.
"It doesn't matter where you live. People are very, very concerned and very interested in their personal safety, their business safety, their residential safety," she said.
That's why Aufiero and other business owners and residents spent their Saturday morning inside the Neighborhood Innovation Center in Dutchtown.
"We're focused on not only preventing crime or solving crime, but also looking at the root causes of crime, so we're never going to be able to stop crime," she said.
For the second year in a row, the Dutchtown Community Improvement District hosted a safety summit.
Aufiero said they decided to do it after the success and solutions it brought in 2022.
"Crime is a societal problem. It's economic. It's a cultural problem," she said.
There were several different organizations there on Saturday to offer a comprehensive exploration into what safety means.
According to Aufiero, their focus was on personal, technology and community wide.
"We're not going to stop all crime. We need people to understand that there are things we can do, and we all need to be proactive toward our own engagement and our own involvement," she said.
Over the past few years, the Dutchtown Community Improvement District has been focused on cameras. Flock cameras were recently implemented on the streets to help police and they also have expanded their 'Curated Camera Network.'
Aufiero said this year, they've added a third peg, which they are calling the 'Community Camera Partnership.'
"That's a camera registry that will help us to help the police even more than what we are already doing," she said.
Organizers, like Aufiero, are hopeful all these tools together can help their neighborhood identify crimes faster and provide information to law enforcement quicker.
"I live here. I have business here. I'm affected by crime in our neighborhood, just as everybody else is," she said.
It's a problem though, that Aufiero said, can't be solved on it its own.
"It really takes all of us and being joined together as a community," she said.
Aufiero said crime is down this year compared to last year in her neighborhood. She believes some of the things they implemented after the summit 2022 helped with the reduction.
Top St. Louis headlines
Get the latest news and details throughout the St. Louis area from 5 On Your Side broadcasts here.