If people in the Whalley, Edgewood and Beaver Hills (WEB) neighborhoods are unhappy with the way police are doing their job, they’re not the ones coming to the WEB management team meetings. At Tuesday night’s meeting, held at the police substation on Whalley Avenue, residents and the NHPD district supervisor (pictured) traded compliments about successful community policing.
Sgt. Stephen Shea (pictured above with resident Leslie Swiman) presented his monthly crime report of burglaries (14), robberies (8) and gunshots fired (7). Bob Caplan (pictured, with Alderwoman Liz McCormack behind him), who was running the meeting, asked Shea whether he saw any trends emerging. Shea said the levels were the same as last month, but mentioned that one of the robberies was committed by three young people on bikes. “I hope we’re not going to see what we saw last year,” regarding a spike in crime by young people riding bicycles, Shea said.
He also reported on the shooting of a 15-year-old outside Walgreen’s at Whalley and Orchard, which was apparently the spillover from an earlier confrontation at Hillhouse High School.
On the positive side, Shea added, “The increased walking beats that you guys requested seem to have paid off,” when officers arrested two suspects in the act of burglarizing an empty house.
Some residents agreed, complimenting the work of both Sgt. Shea and the patrol officers.
Later in the meeting, Nan Bartow (pictured) presented a proposed management plan for Beaver Pond Park from a group of students at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. The pro-bono plan would address “both the social and the biological concerns” around the park, including an inventory of the native and non-native flora and fauna, a water quality assessment and creation of a “social map” of the area surrounding the park with analysis of historical and socioeconomic data.
The management plan would support the objective of the Friends of Beaver Pond Park “to ecologically rehabilitate Beaver Pond Park so that it will serve as wildlife habitat.” Residents in Friends of Beaver Pond Park have already made great progress in removing invasive plants, clearing out trash and planting native trees and shrubs.
Bartow said the students will present the plan to the Friends group in January or February, and management team members would be invited.