Was it the guns and the Angels?
Eli Greer (at left in photo with, at far right, Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa) said yes: Citizen patrols, one of them armed, were responsible for a dramatic drop in crime in 2007.
A top city official begged to differ.
Greer was reacting to new statistics that show that his part of town — the Whalley, Edgewood, Beaver Hills (WEB) district — had, along with Westvile and Dixwell, the biggest drop in crime in 2007.
The statistics come from a chart put together by the police department. It compares the numbers for various crimes in 2006 with 2007 in the city’s ten policing districts.
Click here to view the district-by-district breakdown. These are the neighborhoods that correspond to the districts:
1 – Downtown/Wooster Square
2 – Westville
3 – Hill South
4 – Dwight/West River
5 – Hill North
6 – Dixwell
7 – Newhallville/East Rock
8 – Fair Haven
9 – East Shore
10 – Edgewood/Beaver Hills
The comparisons look at eight categories of crime, from aggravated assault and robbery to auto theft and discharge of firearms.
Hill South, District 3, posted double-digit percentage in five of the eight categories.
By contrast, in Westville’s District 2, reported incidents dropped from 2006 to 2007 in six of eight categories, including a 23 percent drop in robberies, a 28 percent drop in thefts from autos, and a 38 percent drop in thefts of license plates and registration stickers. Murders were flat (one each year), while aggravated assaults leaped 60 percent (from 25 to 34).
Reported incidents dropped in six categories as well In Dixwell, District 6, including a 38.9 percent drop in auto theft and a 37.5 percent decline in aggravated assaults. There were no murders reported in the district, either.
The Whalley-Edgewood- Beaver Hills area, District 10, topped them all, with seven out of eight declines. Murders dropped from eight to zero.
It was in that same neighborhood that city officials heard perhaps the loudest protests in the middle of 2007 about the disappearance of community policing. Saying they couldn’t trust the cops to do the job anymore, some neighbors led by the Greer family at the Yeshiva of New Haven formed a controversial armed citizens patrol, and invited the Guardian Angels to the neighborhood to form a chapter.
Patrol organizer Eli Greer credited those patrols — along with the work of other neighborhood groups, including the management team — with producing the dramatic drop in crime. (The patrollers put down their guns on Nov. 27.)
“We weren’t going to let the two Cs — the cops and the criminals — become a distraction,” Greer said Wednesday evening. The patrols, he said, “set a very clear marker for the administration — and for the criminals. There was a boundary this neighborhood wouldn’t tolerate.”
City Chief Administrative Officer Rob Smuts (pictured) said “good policing” made the difference.
“We looked at what was happening in the district and responded appropriately” with more patrols, he said. The formation of the citizens patrol led the city to return cops to walking beats in Edgewood.
“I wouldn’t want to” downplay the “positive impact” that neighborhood groups had in helping to cut crime in District 10, Smuts said. But, he added, “they were patrolling for only a limited time, so I wouldn’t want to exaggerate [the impact] either.”
Citywide, crime dropped citywide, except for a jump in shootings. (Click here to read about that.)
Chief Watch
Pressure from Edgewood and neighbors elsewhere in the city, coupled with a federal corruption investigation, helped lead to changes in the city’s police department and a wave of top retirements, including that of Chief Fancisco Ortiz. Ortiz is leaving to take a top security job at Yale.
However, he has agreed to stay in the chief’s job while the city looks for his replacement. The city has retained PERF, a national criminal justice expert team which did a review of the department, to find the new chief.
Smuts said there’s no definite timetable or deadline for Ortiz remaining in the job while that hunt proceeds.
“At some point Yale will start to chomp at the big. But we’d be comfortable” with Ortiz continuing to run the department and the hiring process continuing through “the later portion of the spring.”
“PERF has come and visited and talked with some folks, and met with myself and the mayor for a considerable amount of time,” Smuts said Wednesday.
PERF hasn’t started interviewing candidates for the job yet, according to Smuts; that should happen around mid-March. But it has started “reaching out to their rather significant network” of police departments and officials seeking candidates, Smuts said. And it has “talked to a New York police captain.”
So far the city has received “at least three applications,” according to Smuts.