Page 111 - The Lost Ways

are a lot easier to commit at night, but if the area’s being patrolled, that’s a big deterrent.
Obviously, you can’t do it all yourself; you need to sleep too, and you have other things
to attend to. So find a few volunteers who can see the benefits, and organize a shift
system. These people will do the job of your deputies.

How you patrol will depend a lot on the area. If it’s suburban or even urban, you might
need to control access. A small neighborhood can be held together even in a major
collapse but not if refugees and raiders have easy access.

Then again, you can’t mobilize enough manpower to cover every road. Consider
barricading most of them, at least well enough to keep vehicles out, and having
checkpoints to control the one or two you leave open. A roving deputy can check the
others on his rounds to make sure nobody’s trying to reopen them.

In a rural community, homes are likely to be a lot more scattered, and distances will be
longer. Vehicle patrols are an option here as long as fuel lasts, but outside of town, you’re
more likely to have access to horses and people that can ride. They’re a natural choice for
the job.

Anyone that’s patrolling should be armed with at least a handgun and ideally a shotgun
or rifle, and at night they’ll need a flashlight. If you have radios, they should take one of
those too. What you don’t want is to have them fully kitted out with military-style tactical
gear. They’re just guys out looking after their area and their neighbors after all. They just
have to be visible enough to be noticed.

Especially during the day, your deputies should be well-known and approachable people.
One of the most important things they can do, apart from just being seen, is to talk to
everyone they meet. That makes people feel involved in protecting themselves, which
means they’ll be more supportive of what you’re doing. It also helps information flow
around, and that’s vital. Remember, most of the modern ways of passing on information
will be gone, and just like in the Old West, it’s all going to be done by face-to-face
conversations.

That’s another reason for avoiding the military look. It’s just psychologically harder to talk
to someone that looks ready to fight a war, even if you know them. In the actual military,
a lot of soldiers whose job it is to talk to the locals will walk around with no helmet or
armor and just a sidearm, even in a high-threat environment. They take a risk—and break
the rules—because people are more likely to tell them stuff.

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