Lower crime patterns surprise Harlemites
By Lauren Kirchner
November 23, 2009
When Pat Vitucci learned this summer that a serial rapist was on the loose in the neighborhood where she worked every day, she was grateful for an inbox overloaded with mass e-mails.
In the Hamilton Heights section of Harlem, a young man was apparently breaking into women’s homes and attacking them, sometimes dangling by a rope from roofs and sneaking through unlocked windows. By the first week of September, he had raped and beaten four women. Vitucci wanted what everyone wants when they feel endangered: information.
“I was surprised at how the community really came together,” Vitucci said, taking a break from her job as a concert booker and promoter at Riverbank State Park on West 145th Street. She said she got frequent e-mail alerts from friends and colleagues in the neighborhood reminding each other to stay vigilant. Photocopied signs with sketches of the suspect went up on telephone poles all around the neighborhood. “People were e-mailing updates about what he looked like, what he was wearing, stuff that wasn’t even in the press,” she said. After a coordinated effort from police and residents in the neighborhood, 21-year-old Vincent Heywood was arrested by the end of September. “The 30th precinct really did a good job with that whole thing,” Vitucci said.
The 30th Precinct stretches north of Vitucci’s workplace to West 155th Street and south to West 135th, and from the Hudson River on the west to Bradhurst Avenue in the east. Throughout the precinct, crime is consistently going down and has been for years. According to CompStat crime statistics kept by the New York Police Department, crime there is going down at a much faster rate than the rest of the city. In New York City overall, from 1998 to 2008, rape decreased 48 percent and murder decreased by 17 percent; in the 30th Precinct during the same time period, rape went down 56 percent and murder decreased by 77 percent. The pattern is the same for felony assault and burglary.
Officers from the 30th declined interview requests, but officer Paul Pavarini from the Third transit district, which covers the 1, 2, 3, A, B, C, and D lines north of 96th Street, obliged. Pavarini explained that simple changes in the way he and his colleagues have gone about their jobs have made big differences. He said installing additional surveillance cameras on station platforms could dissuade would-be attackers and thieves. And the practice of stopping people for petty crimes like jumping a turnstile has given officers the opportunity to temporarily detain and check people for outstanding warrants, leading to many arrests. In fact, the only crime that has increased in the 10-year span in the neighborhood is grand larceny, which Pavarini accounted for with the theft of wallets containing credit cards, and of expensive cell phones like iPhones and Blackberries.
Pavarini also stressed the importance of community involvement in both solving and deterring crime. He had just recently taken on the job of community affairs liaison, but he has been working in the neighborhood for 18 years, so he knows it well. “If you create an area where people are proud of their community, they will help you out,” he said. He said he makes sure that he and his officers attend neighborhood fairs, talk to kids and adults about safety tips, and generally stay social, so that residents will feel comfortable coming to them if problems arise.
Theodore Kovaleff, secretary and former chairman of Community Board 9, which encompasses the 30th Precinct and the adjacent 26th, agreed that active and positive police involvement in the community led directly to the capture of the Hamilton Heights rapist. But the relationship between Harlem residents and the NYPD has not always been so smooth, he said. In a phone interview, Kovaleff, who has lived in West Harlem for more than 60 years and is also co-chair of the Uniformed Services Transportation Committee, expressed amazement. “The change in attitude toward the men in blue is not evolutionary, it is revolutionary,” he said. “These were people who were suspected of all evil, and today they have a working relationship…In the late ’60s and ’70s, that never would have happened, because of all of the suspicion.” Clearly, he said, the police department has done a good job of making itself accountable and accessible to people in the neighborhoods it serves.
From where he sat on a sunny afternoon in the Hamilton Grange Senior Center, near Parvini’s office in the 145th Street subway station, George Harris was just as surprised by the downward crime trends in his neighborhood. Harris has lived on West 145th Street for over 20 years, and he has seen how dramatic the decrease in crime has been. Harris said the decrease in crack cocaine use, and the booming economy throughout the 1990s that encouraged local business and employment, both probably contributed to the safer atmosphere of his neighborhood. “I remember when all along 146th, there used to be only one viable business, a wash house. You’d go there every week to do wash, and every week, you’d hear about how someone had just got shot on the street,” he said. “Now, people walk everywhere at night, even into the parks, it really surprises me.”
Harris does fear, though, that the recent economic downturn throughout the city and country might cause crime to rise again. He is a street vendor, selling socks on corners, and so he believes that if petty crime increases, he will soon see it firsthand. “The way the economy is, people are getting desperate,” he said. “Most of those crimes happen between now and Christmas. People don’t have jobs, but they want to give gifts. Street vendors like me are going to become vulnerable.”
Larry Lucas, a friend of Harris’ sitting with him at Hamilton Grange, concurred. “You can see now, everybody is hanging out on the street during the day, especially guys,” Lucas said. “You’ve got people selling water, selling cigarettes…it’s because of the massive unemployment.” Lucas cited several violent crimes that had occurred nearby in the past few months mostly stabbings and shootings of victims who had just taken cash out of an ATM, all of which seemingly related to poverty and desperation.
Then Harris gestured toward newly-built but still-empty condominiums down the street. “This neighborhood will be even safer, too, once the money starts flowing again and the developers can finish these buildings and bring more people in, they’ll clean it up.” He laughed about how police officers seemed to be ubiquitous around recently-gentrified areas: “you’ll see a sea of blue.”
A life-long resident of Harlem, Naomi Ekperigin, 25, lives on Edgecombe Avenue between West 137th and 138th Streets. She has a different take on the effects of gentrification on crime, which she says has taken effect in the past five years or so. “I don’t necessarily think that gentrification makes it safer [here],” she said in a phone interview. “Even though there are more amenities here now, I think it has actually caused more anger between the haves and the have-nots.” She added that she would expect to hear of more petty crimes, thefts and break-ins, “when you have these new high-rise buildings being built up against old buildings with people that have lived here for years.”
Whereas Harris and Lucas see gentrification as a phenomenon that will lower crime, Ekperigin thinks it will raise it, and Pavarini doesn’t think it necessarily has any effect on its own. Why should all of these people living and working in the same neighborhood have such different perspectives? Marjorie Cohen, director of the non-profit Westside Crime Prevention Program, has one answer. She educates and organizes crime-fighting groups on the Upper West Side and Harlem, often in low-income New York City Housing Authority buildings. Cohen said in a recent phone interview that she has seen an interesting phenomenon that reveals the sharp contrast between perception and reality. “We ask people, ‘Do you feel safe in your neighborhood?’ and they will say ‘No,’” she recounted. “But then we say, ‘Do you feel safe in your apartment?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Your street?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Your building?’ ‘Yes.’ It’s very interesting.”
Cohen said that even when areas become safer, fears often remain. “It’s a lot easier for me to get rid of the drug dealer on your corner than it is for me to change your perception of how safe your neighborhood is,” she said. For instance, some seniors she works with perceive all teenagers as dangerous: they see a crowd of kids, and they assume they are all drug dealers. But if older people and younger people spent more time together one on one, there would not be that misconception. Which is why, Cohen stressed, it is so important to have open communication between neighbors, and between neighbors and police, so that fears and anxieties are addressed. “As long as there’s the idea of the ‘other,’ you’re not going to make progress,” Cohen said. “There’s going to be fear.”
