Neighbor-To-Neighbor Solutions Pitched

Two messengers brought Westvilleans ideas for combating an uptick in neighborhood crime — community-powered ideas that don’t involve more cops, more arrests, or locking up young people.

Westville neighbors heard about those two ideas — more neighborhood block watches and a neighborhood-specific restorative justice program — at an hour-and-a-half-long meeting held Tuesday night in the Edgewood School cafeteria.

The meeting was organized by Woodbridge Avenue resident Pam Fahey, and was the third such property crime-focused brainstorming session that she, neighborhood top cop Lt. Rose Dell, and Westville Alder Adam Marchand have put together so far this year.

According to the New Haven Police Department’s latest weekly CompStat report, there have been a total of 543 property crimes committed in the Westville/West Hills policing district since Jan. 1. Those include burglaries, motor vehicle thefts, and larcenies from vehicles, and represent a 19.3 percent increase over this same time last year.

Unlike at previous Westville property crime-focused meetings, there were no shouting matches Tuesday night between political candidates or talks about setting up citizen patrols.

Instead, the 10 neighbors present heard crime-prevention, community-building pitches from Dawn Lewis, who is the executive assistant to Police Chief Otoniel Reyes; and from Shirley Ellis-West, the interim executive director of New Haven Family Alliance. They also heard from Children In Placement Executive Director Juliet Freimuth as well as from Lt. Dell and Chief Reyes.

Lewis said that Reyes recently tapped her to spearhead a new citywide block watch organizing initiative.

She plans to help neighbors from West Hills to the East Shore learn how to set up block watches, how to share, discuss, and deter basic quality-of-life crimes on their streets, and how to use these community groups as vehicles for building trust and camaraderie among households — through planting gardens, shoveling snow, hosting annual parties.

Ellis-West, meanwhile, suggested to the assembled Westvilleans that they set up their own neighborhood-specific Juvenile Review Board (JRB), a restorative justice diversionary program that Family Alliance currently runs throughout the city for first-time youth offenders charged with misdemeanors.

Westville neighbors would be trained to serve on ​“accountability boards” which would help come up with individually-tailored tasks — everything from performing community service to signing up for a basketball league to interviewing a local lawyer — for young people who commit property crimes in the neighborhood. Those tasks wouldn’t be arbitrarily determined, she said, but rather based off of the background and interests of the young offender as well as from recommendations from that offender’s dedicate Family Alliance case worker. Individuals who participate in the program would not be prosecuted for their crimes, which is also the case for the citywide JRBs her organization currently runs.

Reyes told the group that these types of community meetings, in which police and neighbors and social-service providers talk about everything from the importance of locking one’s car to community-powered crime prevention initiatives, are exactly what’s needed to curb any kind of rise in quality-of-life crimes — whether in Westville or any neighborhood.

“What we’re doing here,” he said, ​“is a big part of” that work.

A Block Watch Revival

Lewis told the group that her passion for block watches is a relatively recent one.

Earlier this year, her car was broken into near her home on Roger White Drive in Beaver Hills. Her GPS device was stolen. She was left frustrated and a little shocked. ​“I’m the assistant to the chief,” she said, and even she had been burglarized.

But then she reminded herself: Property crime offenders don’t care, or, most the time even know, from whom they are stealing. They see an opportunity, an unlocked car or a house with no lights on, and they strike.

So she decided to start up a neighborhood block watch. She reached out to neighbors, and defined a block watch territory bounded by Roger White Drive, Dyer Street, and Stimson Road. The territory includes 72 homes. Eight households are already regular participants in the block watch.

Those block watch members meet up every few months at the Whalley Avenue police substation and read through the latest CompStat crime-statistics reports. They talk about what crimes they’ve seen in the neighborhood and how that corroborates with what’s in the police department’s reports. They also stay in touch in between meetings by email and phone. They alert one another, as well as the police, anytime they see someone stealing packages or breaking into garages or checking car doors on the block. This Thursday will make their fourth meeting, she said.

“It becomes neighbors looking out for neighbors.” And come spring time, she said, her block watch plans to do more than just keep track of crime in the area. They also plan to help each other plant gardens on their properties to both beautify the block and get to know their neighbors.

The city used to have a dedicated staffer at the police department who coordinated all of the city’s block watches, Lewis said. That staffer no longer exists, and, she estimated. There are probably only around 20 active block watches left in the city. In the coming months, she said, she plans to be a resource not just for her Roger White Drive neighbors, but for anyone in town who wants to start a block watch — and then to start keeping a list of active groups, and best practices.

Alden Avenue resident and former Westville alder candidate Dennis Serfilippi (pictured) asked Lt. Dell if the police department keeps any kind of list of homes with active video cameras.

Some block watches and police departments around the country pool together individual camera recordings, so as to better track where a suspect’s moves throughout the neighborhood.

“A camera registry is not something we have currently,” Dell said. She added she would encourage any neighbor with a camera at home to reach out to the PD so that officers can check available video footage if and when a suspect passes by that property.

“To keep an ongoing list would be helpful,” she said.

Lewis said she regularly recommends that neighbors buy doorbell cameras that activate their recordings when someone passes by the door. They cost around $100, she said, and are invaluable for helping the police track package thieves in particular.

In fact, Dell said, city police have been able to identify and arrest three recent package thieves all thanks to doorbell cameras owned by Westville neighbors.

Ward 25 Democratic committee Co-Chair Janis Underwood said that she remembers a time when all block watch captains throughout the city met up periodically to share best practices.

Lewis said she hopes to bring back that type of citywide coordination of the block watches.

“And it’s really, really important that you also have a block watch party,” she added. Annual block watch parties allow neighbors to get to know one another, meet new residents, have fun together and build new connections and trust and a sense of community.

Marchand offered his own firsthand testimony to the power of block watch parties: Several Westville block watches already engage in such annual get-togethers, including those on West Elm Street and McKinley Avenue and Elmwood Road. He said the city also frequently honors requests from block watches to close down their respective streets for the afternoon so that neighbors can celebrate and get to know one another outside their very homes.

Neighborhood-Specific Restorative Justice

Ellis-West also came to Tuesday night’s meeting a pitch that blended community building and property crime prevention: A Westville-specific restorative justice program modeled after the Juvenile Review Boards already run by Family Alliance through the city.

The way the program currently works: City police officers refer to Family Alliance first-time juvenile offenders who are between 8 and 17 years old and have been charged with a misdemeanor. Those young people are then given a choice: To participate in a six-months of supportive case management and have the charges dropped, or to face prosecution in the courts. Many families, she said, choose the former.

That case management work provided by Family Alliance focuses on goal setting, conflict resolution, and educational support.

The participants are taught how to engage with their crime, to think about what happened during that incident, about whom they harmed and how they harmed them. There’s no restitution sought, she said, and participants are not charged.

A key part of the JRB program are volunteer-staffed ​“accountability boards” of adults who get to know each participant and create a list of recommended actions or tasks that they believe the young offender should engage in as part of his or her rehabilitation.

These recommendations are ​“strength-based,” she said, and are not meant to be punitive. They should tap into the skills and interests and background of a given participant, and should leave them feeling better about themselves and the community to which they belong.

They could involve community service, she said. Or joining a basketball team if they’re interested in sports. Or interviewing a local lawyer if they aspire to one day be a lawyer themselves.

The possibilities are endless, she said, and only bounded by the creativity of the accountability board members.

This type of restorative justice program could be adapted specifically to the Westville neighborhood, she said. She offered to train interested in neighbors in how to participate on such an accountability board.

Then, she said, ​“if a young person got arrested in your neighborhood, you’d be trained to facilitate the process.” Trained Westville volunteers would work with Family Alliance case managers to better understand who the young offender is — where they go to school, how old they are, where they come from in the city — and then come up with a list of recommended strength-based activities to be completed during their JRB stint.

“We ask that your accountability board be diverse,” Ellis-West said, both racially and professionally, with representatives from local businesses and different parts of the neighborhood and even neighborhood-assigned police.

But if a teen from outside of Westville is assigned an accountability board made up entirely of Westville volunteers, one attendee asked, will that just make the whole feel too overwhelming distant from that child’s day-to-day life?

“It’s very difficult to commit crimes against people you know,” Reyes said. By that logic, young offenders who commit a crime in Westville and then go through a neighborhood-specific JRB program would emerge from the process with a better understanding of who lives and works in Westville and of exactly whom they’ve harmed in the neighborhood.

“You’re no longer this unknown person,” Reyes said. ​“There’s no disconnect anymore.”

This program would show participants that the people they’ve harmed don’t want to see them locked up, but instead want to see them thriving and living happy, positive, and socially-productive lives in the city. And for the Westville volunteers, he said, this process would demonstrate that someone who has committed a crime in the neighborhood isn’t some anonymous villain, but instead is a person his or her own unique story.