The neighborhood watch team gathers at 8 pm every weeknight, and the group of 10 volunteers patrols the downtown streets of Flushing, the largest urban center in the New York City borough of Queens and home to the city's second-largest Chinatown.

The self-defense group sprung up from the rape and murder almost four years ago of a 23-year-old Chinese, Yu Yao, who had been in New York City for only two months.

On the night of May 16, 2010, she walked into a roadside argument with Carlos Salazar Cruz, who police say was drunk. He attacked her, smashed her face with a pipe, then dragged her into an alley and raped her. Security camera footage suggests at least seven passers-by apparently ignored her cries for help. Yao lingered in a coma for the next five days; on the sixth she was disconnected from life-support.

It was the "it-could-have-been-me" element that pulled Taiwan-born Chinese Michael Chu from his work at a travel agency to get involved in forming the neighborhood watch group.

"It was 9 pm. She was just there, screaming, but nobody gave her a hand. I was so angry. So we started patrolling the area one week after the incident," Chu said.

Some 1,514 local volunteers have signed up for the patrol service since it started on May 28, 2010. The creation of the neighborhood watch group has been duplicated elsewhere. A few weeks ago, a similar one was started in another Chinese populated area at 8th Avenue in Brooklyn.

"We want to make this community more livable. We want to encourage people to do good things. I am glad to see that more people are aware of the fact that Chinese are easy targets," Chu said in an interview with China Daily.

The Flushing neighborhood watch team consists of a variety of non-professionals, including supermarket workers, taxi drivers, students and new arrivals, with 40 percent of them women, Chu said.

"We have uniforms like these beige vests. When we see someone in danger or something unusual, we will just blow a whistle and call 911,'' he explained.

Apart from running a travel agency business and a monthly newspaper, Chu's role as a social advocate is recognized and he has become influential in the Flushing Chinese community.

His activities have ranged from creating the watch group and helping a nanny collect her wages after they were illegally withheld by her employer for more than a year to organizing a lobby among residents to block the opening of a waste transfer center near Flushing.

Chu's third-floor office in downtown Flushing has become a headquarters for free consultations on domestic disputes.