Charlotte Lesser retires after 45 years leading Neighborhood Watch

  On the last day of February in 1980, Charlotte Lesser saw a newspaper headline that grabbed her attention. “A Streak of Stealing That Just Won’t Stop,” the Daily Breeze headline read, atop a story about 111 burglaries that had occurred within Manhattan Beach in the previous month.  Neither the news of the crimes themselves nor the part that said “just won’t stop” settled well with Lesser. She is not given to apathy, and so Lesser had an immediate idea how to take action