Campaign Advances Vs. Crime in Public Housing

By JULIAN CANTRES

The success of the de Blasio Adinistration’s campaign to  reduce crime and violence in the city’s public housing projects was trumpeted Tuesday at a City Council committee hearing in Brooklyn.

Witnesses at the hearing of the Council’s Public Housing Committee at the Brueklelen Houses Community Center reported that crime in the complexes had decreased 14.4 percent  between July 1 and the present, compared to the same period last year. While the overall crime rate was down, shootings had increased slightly.

The police department housing chief Carlos Gomez zeroed in on 15 “problem” complexes that accounted for 20 percent of the crime in the 334 projects overall.

The lineup included Boulevard Houses in Brooklyn, where 6-year-old Prince Joshua Avitto was fatally stabbed in an elevator on July 1. Gomez reported that crimes had decreased in many of them, but he also mentioned that six- including Bushwick Houses, also in Brooklyn- saw increases during the last two-and-a-half months.

Elizabeth Glazer, de Blasio’s Director of Criminal Justice, elaborated on some of the safety measures that were put into place as part of the mayor’s plan, which was announced on August 8. About $210 million was being spent on installing features such as cameras and lights, taking down scaffolding, and hiring more police officers to patrol the areas, among other security measures.

The panel members stated that they wanted the officers to understand the communities where they work, with Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito saying that the program must be more than “about how many people we can arrest.”

Despite the rosy picture everal community board members expressed anger and frustration over the “bureaucratic problems” that had delayed earlier attempts at fixing problems in apartment complexes. One person mentioned that funding for new security cameras had been delayed for five years, saying “If the money is there, use it immediately.”

Other problems highlighted were keys occasionally not working correctly and leaving people stranded outdoors during emergencies such as the snowstorm in January.

Glazer addressed these concerns by saying that the program was still being refined and that it was intended to be more than “just a pile of programs”.