If this looks like a team photo, it is, sort of. But why were Sgt. Bernie Somers and A.P. Mastrogiovanni (on the left in the photo) and Angelo DeLeo, the president and secretary respectively of the Westville-West Hills Neighborhood Management Team, far from home and hanging out at the Whalley/Edgewood/Beaver Hill (WEB) Management Team meeting on Tuesday night at the substation across from Edge of the Woods?
At the answer to that question lies the core of community policing as it is practiced in New Haven. “At our meetings in Westville,” said Sgt. Somers, “we discuss almost entirely police matters. That’s not the way it should be. But the WEB team here has a much broader range of issues that they deal with, and they are well organized. I wanted my guys to come here, to observe this in action and maybe bring some lessons back to home, because the focus of community policing should be on community, not just the police.” Mastrogiovanni and DeLeo were paying careful attention, but would they buy in?
The first lesson was provided by Bob Caplan, president of the WEB team. “The bylaws that apply to all neighborhood management teams,” he began, “state that purpose is to improve the quality of life, reduce crime, and to work in partnership with the police and other city departments.” Tellingly, improving quality of life, in the definition at least, precedes policing.
Sgt. Stephen Shea, Somers’ equivalent at WEB, who was repeatedly credited by the 40-plus attendees for WEB’s success (including the team’s Livable City Initiative specialist Elaine Braffman, also pictured) was positively eloquent about the management team concept: “It’s the core of policing here. Why? Because it’s all about relationships and communication, and you see who’s here, a cornucopia of block watchers, local merchants and business owners who exchange information and ideas; policing is only part of it.”
An undeniably big part, and Sgt. Shea’s report, as always, was a centerpiece: Robberies continued to rise in the WEB area, as well as citywide, in Shea’s view because the profit margin in dealing drugs was declining. But the meeting was not entirely a lovefest. This resident of Winthrop Avenue, who declined to give his name, was not completely happy with the sergeant’s view: “The dealers,” he said, “are getting bolder because the police do have so much else to do. It’s very unfortunate.”
The Westville visitors then heard an extensive report on how the Civilian Review Board works “” each management team can send a representative to it. But that, in the meeting, shared equal agenda time with a report on Reading Club held at the substation on Saturdays for neighborhood kids. There’s an impressive library for little kids. Sgt. Shea’s daughter came by last weekend, he reported, and had a terrific time.
Another sign of health at such meetings is the presence of representatives of area organizations reporting on their work and concerns. The WEB meeting included people from Cornerstone, the drug treatment organization, Neighborhood Housing Services, and Nan Bartow (pictured), the coordinator of the Friends of Beaver Pond Park. She reported that a management plan for Beaver Pond Park, spearheaded by students from Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, is moving ahead, as is a design and implementation for filters and catch basins to prevent local debris from washing into the pond.
If the visiting team hadn’t heard enough yet, Eliezer Greer, the board co-chair of the ward (pictured along with Ward 24 Alderwoman Liz McCormack) gave a favorable update on the negotiations with the Walgreen’s development at Whalley and Ellsworth. The store had agreed to move a parking lot, conceal a Dumpster, and preserve a stand of old trees along the avenue. Greer, who heads a subcommittee on this issue for the WEB team, said he was also going to go after Walgreens to forgo a planned, and, in his view, ugly digital sign. Oh, and the Edgewood Neighborhood Association, with which Greer also works, has planted 50 trees in the area.
However, the most spirited discussion the Westville visitors were exposed to focused on what to do about the police firing range, located at the police academy on Sherman. It has been the target, as it were, of recurrent community complaint for noise pollution, environmental pollution (the spent shells, with lead and other chemicals, leach into nearby Beaver Pond). More alarming, according to Newhallville Alderman Charles Blango, have been the deleterious psychological effect on kids in the three nearby schools, and the whole community. “When we hear gunfire,” he said, “we don’t know if it’s the police practicing or a kid being shot.”
Shea reminded Blango that police officers are mandated to practice with their firearms. Beaver Hills Alderman Mordecai (Moti) Sandelman (to the right in the photo), while sympathetic to Shea, joined Blango in appealing to his Newhalville district to join a committee already working for a year and a half, to get the city’s attention to either move the firing range or encase/soundproof it. Blango said he would do so, but the cost, some $5 million, might be found in Homeland Security funds (since FBI, Coast Guard and other federal personnel also use the range) or elsewhere so that New Haven taxpayers would not bear the burden.
What did the visiting Westville-West Hills team make of this welter of activity in a nearly two-hour long meeting? “We’re not really like this,” said Mastrogiovanni to a reporter afterwards. “It’s true we have some drug problems, but, how shall I put this, our area is more suburban. There’s all this activity here because there are so many more people living close together.”
“I beg to differ,” added Sgt. Somers. “Maybe we don’t have the firing range, but we have other problems. And for them we need committees and some of this structure, right? From now on, we need meetings that go beyond my report and the LCI report. Right? For example, we have that seedy run-down package store on Fitch and Blake, which is in our area, that a developer is working on, and at the next meeting instead of you asking me what’s going on, I’m going to ask you and Angelo to go find out first and come back, like a committee, and report. Okay?”
Stay tuned …