Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Gotham

Bragging of Safety While Many Live in Fear

The twin holes resemble diamond studs, and a crack in the glass curls, as graceful as an eyelash along the lobby window.

A few weeks back a young gangbanger took aim at teenagers wending their way home from school to the Howard Houses in Brownsville, Brooklyn. He blasted twice and missed, and ran.

He left behind his gunman’s artwork.

You enter this public housing tower at 40 Glenmore Avenue and walk a few flights to enter a handsome apartment with graduation photographs of children on the walls. A spry grandmother who is a tenant leader talks of life here.

Two weeks ago, Aaron Utsey, 21, was gunned down in the courtyard. She’d known Mr. Utsey since he was a toddler, and she rode the bus with his family to the morgue. The attendant unzipped the green bag.

“They opened that sack and Aaron had two big holes in his chest,” she said. “Then the shooters put a video of the shooting on Facebook.”

She asked to remain anonymous out of fear for her own safety.

She shakes her head, mournful. “I feel bad for my grandchildren, but I won’t let them out. That” — she points out her window at a playground with slides surrounded by sycamores — “is play at your own risk.”

New York City’s safety narrative is a long-established boast. This city is strikingly safe. Crime fell dramatically during the tenure of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and has plummeted in the first four months of the administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio.

Yet sad and bloody corners remain. Walk the Brooklyn canyons of the Howard, Linden, the Tilden and Van Dykes Houses, or the Webster Houses in the Bronx, and watch young men watch you. The Daily News recently reported that crime had edged up stubbornly in the public houses in the past five years.

Tough police tactics have beaten a hasty retreat. Stop and frisk metastasized under the former commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, as a legal police tactic became blunt and discriminatory. Two years ago, I traveled to York College and spoke to 20 matriculating black male students. All reported being stopped multiple times.

The de Blasio administration has settled two civil rights lawsuits aimed at curtailing such policies.

A third lawsuit is not settled. It takes issue with vertical patrols, which is the police practice of walking the stairwells of public housing. Civil rights groups charge that African-Americans and Latinos “bear the brunt” of these “intentionally discriminatory and race based” tactics.

Image
Edythe Jenkins has lived in the Linden Houses for 31 years.Credit...Bryan R. Smith for The New York Times

I don’t doubt there are abuses. Yet the separate and unequal rhetoric of an earlier age grates. What is truly separate and unequal is that so many public tenants live with a menace unknown to most New Yorkers.

Talk to tenants and, yes, they want the police to respect their sons, most definitely. They also want officers to walk their stairwells and to peer into elevators. In this fashion, they hope their sons remain alive.

I call Michael Gecan, a cool-eyed organizer for the Industrial Areas Foundation, which organizes for tenants and homeowners throughout the city.

“Here’s something I’ve never heard from tenants in public housing: ‘There are too many police here,’ ” he says. “More often is the opposite.”

Edythe Jenkins has lived in the Linden House for 31 years. She sent her son off to boarding school, and now he has two college degrees and a beautiful house near Atlanta. Her daughter is a 911 operator.

When her grandson visited, Ms. Jenkins stood by the living room window and watched as he walked to buy a quart of milk at the Pawn Rite store. She saw young men eying his sneakers.

She trotted over and challenged them. “They started to get in my face, then one of them recognized me and they backed off,” Ms. Jenkins said. That night, her grandson slept restlessly. “There was so much reefer smoking in the hall it woke him up.”

That beloved grandson — now a high school senior and visiting Harvard and Yale — told her: “Grandma, you have to leave.”

She can’t. This is home. Last summer she had a barbecue, which was lovely until some fool across the courtyard shot a gun. “Stop and frisk?” she says. “I have no problem with that. Please, I want vertical patrols, too.”

I asked Donna Lieberman of the New York Civil Liberties Union about this. She knows that many upper-income New Yorkers live in buildings with doormen, where nonresidents must be invited in. She acknowledges that much policing resides in a realm of gray.

“Cops need to know their turf and the residents,” she said. “We have to move away from hyperaggressive policing.”

That is undoubtedly important. No less important are those two bullet holes in the door of 40 Glenmore Avenue.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 18 of the New York edition with the headline: Bragging of Safety While Many Live in Fear. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT