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ocation, location, location. Once upon a time you only had to say Bed-Stuy to conjure up ‘round-the-clock drug deals, gun buys and the not-so-occasional body in the stairwell. Now you say Bed-Stuy and, while the drugs, guns, and bodies are still to be found on too much of a regular basis, you can also be talking about real estate deals; or, as some of the slicker realtors have gotten into the habit of tabbing the north Brooklyn area for prospective buyers, “South Williamsburg.” Sitting in the middle of these different meanings of location, at the intersection of Tompkins and Lexington avenues, is the 79 Pct., responsible for policing 1.2 square miles. Few commands in the city have produced such startling drops in crime figures over the last 15 years. Between 1990 and 2006, for example, murders plunged from 71 to 23, rapes from 96 to 35, robberies from 2,442 to 525, felonious assaults from 1,349 to 428, burglaries from 1,706 to 361, and grand larcenies from 744 to 170. Even as mere numbers, the decline can’t fail to impress. The musical backdrop to the fall in crime has been a frequently ear-splitting symphony of bulldozers, power drills, and buzz saws, with abandoned buildings and rubble-filled lots being cleared out of the way for a swelling army of developers who go off to sleep every night counting co-ops. If only a few years ago the command seemed to have to operate within a cloud of decay, today the cloud is more often than not the dust from all the overhauling, rebuilding, and sanding going on. |
“I don’t think anyone’s going to claim we’re there yet,” says Police Officer David Arroyo during a recent afternoon patrol, “but little by little you see the old facades coming down and new people moving in.” Many of the new arrivals are the Hasidim moving into the zone from the pricier Williamsburg section. Arroyo is one cop who welcomes the influx. “They’re family oriented and they bring stability with them. They may not be the best drivers in the world, but who wouldn’t swap a few fender benders for heavier things?” But progress isn’t that simple, either, as demonstrated by the first call of the day summoning Arroyo and his partner Tony Gonzalez: suspected squatters in a shuttered dumbbell tenement awaiting demolition. In fact, the more dreams developers have had about taking over rundown buildings, the more calls there have been about squatters or others breaking into sealed off houses for the scrap metal potential in the fixtures and wires left behind. In this particular call, on Ellery Street, the cops see no sign of anything amiss from outside. They make the vertical carefully; there is no percentage in taking the shaky banisters or torn-up staircase steps for granted. The apartments on each floor betray recent crashing but, with one or two exceptions, clearly of the nap-and-out variety. Apartment after apartment, the wires and plumbing fixtures have long since been pulled out and fenced. The articles left behind on the floors — pieces of chintzy clothing, plastic this and paper that — weren’t worth much even when they had been sitting on a shelf in a store.
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The first exception is a second-floor space that has been converted into a viable bed-with-TV area. (“All the comforts of somebody else’s home,” as Gonzalez puts it.) The floor mattress even has a glitzy cover sheet and substantial blanket. The second exception is up on the third floor, where a teenage girl had apparently been living with her mother for a couple of stolen nights. A school notebook left behind on a windowsill painstakingly records her one-time preoccupation with molecules and chemical formulas. The notebook is a year old. Up on the roof, the cops find the reason for the radio call — a teenage couple just sitting around and talking. “Why’d anyone want to report us?” the girl asks indignantly. Reminded that the building had been sealed for gutting, she reacts: “And what? We’re going to lower property values some more by sitting up here to talk for a few minutes?” Once their IDs check out, the teens are sent on their way while Arroyo and Gonzalez return to the street by inspecting the adjoining tenement. Not only is no one catching daylight shuteye, there is little evidence of anyone having camped out on the premises for quite some time. Or, as a resident of the block awaiting the cops back down on the street laughs: “You know who probably called you guys, don’t you? The owner. He’s sittin’ in his office over in the city somewhere and thinks, ‘Hey, what’s it gonna cost to send some cops around to my houses, make sure nobody’s been sleepin’ there. An anonymous phone call, that’s all!’” |
