Cedar Hill Gets Pie & A Promise

The unofficial Mayor of Cedar Hill got an ally when her neighborhood got a new top cop. But over pizza with the crew in blue, she wondered whether that’ll be enough to bring her small pocket of the city the police protection it needs.

That issue emerged Tuesday night at ​“Pizza with a Cop,” a Halloween-themed gathering organized by the new Newhallville/East Rock/Cedar Hill top cop, Sgt. Shafiq Abdussabur. It was the latest of a series of food-themed get-to-know-your-cop events in the district.

The event took place at Vivid Imaginations Hall, a new community meeting and party spot on State near Rock Street, across from the Hess gas station, where a shooting recently occurred. That’s the edge of Cedar Hill, a small self-contained neighborhood cut off from the rest of New Haven by East Rock Park and I‑91. The neighborhood chronic history of drug-related crimes and slumlord problems; because it’s so small, it occasionally gets its own beat cop, or part-time beat cop, only to lose the cop soon after because of limited budgets in a wide policing district.

Tuesday’s event was hosted by stalwarts of the Cedar Hill Blockwatch, including the neighborhood’s unofficial mayor, Rebecca Turcio, a longtime Cedar Hill organizer and advocate.

Parked outside the venue were two snazzy new bikes. Inside were two officers, Monique Moore and David Santiago, newly assigned to patrol Cedar Hill on those bikes.

Turcio said bike beats and walking beats have been deployed before to address pressing problems in an area that often receives resources but they are often withdrawn due to police pressures to deploy them elsewhere.

For example, two well-liked bike cops who had gotten to know neighbors and storekeepers by proactively knocking on doors were recently withdrawn after only three weeks on the beat, she said.

Meanwhile there are known known drug houses, nearby encampments of people living in the woods beyond Warren and View streets, and other nagging criminal and quality-of-life problems in the area.

These days ​“our biggest issue is people who don’t live in the neighborhood,” and yet come into it to do conduct their drug transactions, she said.
She cited Grace Street as an area where that problem is especially acute.

Long-time blockwatcher Betty Thompson seconded the issue Turcio had raised. ​“Community policing is getting to know the cops. [Then they get pulled out] And we don’t get to know them. That’s our main beef,” she said.

Abdussabur said Moore and Santiago will cover both Cedar Hill and Upper State/Goatville on their bikes, along with Rice Field, the Rock Street playground, and the Orange-Mitchell street park area. They’ll work the afternoon-evening B shift. He said the department’s recent hiring of more officers enabled him to make the assignment.

While the leadership and district managers like himself want as much as possible to keep cops in districts they’ve gotten to know, by terms of the police contract, that is not always possible, Abdussabur said.

With seniority, officers have the right to choose, for example, a day shift over a night shift. ​“We don’t have the ability to tell an officer [with seniority] who works well at night to work in the day” if he doesn’t want to, he said.

That results in the juggling of schedules and personnel that upsets this ideal notion of same officer, same shift everyday, he said. Still, Abdussabur added, ​“We have to make that fit for the community.”

As happy 7‑year-olds dressed up as (in Abdussabur’s phrase) extra-duty officers gorged on pizza and other treats at Tuesday’s party, Abdussabur made his case that you can no more totally control crime than you can control the weather.

What you can control is the relationship between the police and the community, he averred.

Thus the trust-building community events, and the training of his officers to get to know neighbors and storekeepers by in fact knocking on their doors and initiating relationships, as opposed to getting to know folks only at moments of stress and crisis.

“Part of my philosophy about community engagement is we always come to your house when something is wrong. We can’t build a relationship when there’s tragedy,” he said.

Crime at its core can’t be conquered by the police, he said. ​“We can’t control that. Our strategy is community engagement. That we can control. Formats like this [meet-and-greet] open the door to trust,” he added.

When many people think of ​“community policing” their idea is ​“the same cop every day, every time, but the hard reality is it doesn’t work” that way, Abdussabur conceded.

As the pizza-eaters and party-goers slowly exited, Abdussabur made sure to distribute his card with his contact info to as many folks as possible. He said Turcio is his Facebook friend and she can — and does — reach him any time. That accessibility is part of Abdussabur’s personal notion of community policing as well.

“Cedar Hill deserves some attention,” he said, and he intends to provide it. With all the coming and going of staff, Abdussabur said, he has labored to make sure that at least one patrol car is daily assigned to the neighborhood.

As to problems caused by extensive encampments of people on the fringes of the neighborhood, he called that a general social problem, not a specifically police issue. He has spoken to alders, to staff at Livable City Initiative, and to the parks Department about working on it.

In the meantime, the ​“building trust with the community one pizza at a time”- style fun events continue. After Koffee with a Cop in September and Tuesday’s’s Pizza with a Cop, what food or beverage theme comes next?

Kupcakes with a Cop, naturally.

That event, scheduled for the first week in December, will be held at Katalina’s Kupcakes on Whitney Avenue.

“She’s making special small cupcakes, mini police-officer cupcakes,” he said, with a smile.