Over on Design Observer, Rob Walker writes about his growing awareness that signs of Boris the Burglar have been sullied all over his Savannah, Ga. neighborhood:
I found this somewhat darkly amusing: Could there be a less reassuring symbol of neighborhood watchfulness than a pilfered and abandoned Neighborhood Watch sign?
If you’re anything like me, you just thought to yourself, “Boris?” And then, “oh yeah, Boris.” Boris the Burglar is, it turns out, the given name of the cartoon figure that appears on signs promoting neighborhood watch groups. It’s a curious design: A man in a fedora and cloak with a hint of eyes peeking from beneath a robber mask. (Though it is not, perhaps, so odd as the fact that McGruff the Crime Dog wears a trench coat.) Boris has become, over the decades, a bit of weirdness that is now so much a part of the cultural fabric that it’s easy to forget he’s there.
Boris is the work of the National Sheriffs’ Association, which created the Neighborhood Watch program in 1972 to address residential break-ins. Even today, it’s a distributed program. The sheriffs’ association disseminates materials to local law enforcement, which in turn distributes it to neighborhood groups. Walker notes, though, that even the sheriffs don’t know who designed Boris, or what sort of thinking went into the design.
Boris, of course, looks a lot like Boris Badenov of “Rocky and Bullwinkle.” The neighborhood watch program began, however, smack in the middle of the Cold War. “Boris” might have simply been short hand for bad guy.
One reason that Walker might have seen his signs marked up is that they feature an older design of Boris the Burglar. Newer versions of the logo, such as the one above, include “the international prohibition symbol,” the sheriffs’ association writes, which “denotes saying NO to the threat of burglaries, vandalism, and other neighborhood crimes embodied in the character of Boris.” Savannah’s signs, lacking the red circle, suggest a certain nefarious pro-Borisism. That discrepancy seems to call for a nationwide study of how frequently the different versions are vandalized.
When North Carolina switched its neighborhood watch signs in 1981 to the watching eye logo, the director of one local watch group objected: “Because they changed the sign from Boris to the eye, it’s going to negate a lot of work that has gone on.”
Boris is a U.S. design. London’s neighbourhood watch program features, instead, adorable yet vigilant meerkats:
Bet ya those never get defaced.
Nancy Scola is a Washington, DC-based journalist whose work tends to focus on the intersections of technology, politics, and public policy. Shortly after returning from Havana she started as a tech reporter at POLITICO.
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