Flora Place would receive as much “benefit” from this as anyone in Shaw, and to exclude Flora seems arbitrary.
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The Flora Place exclusion is in place because they have formed their own taxing district previously. Does anyone really think that forcing them to support two taxing districts is fair? Of course not.
Yeah, Flora already pays for their own private police – so really, we’ve been benefiting from their private patrols. Get your facts straight!
Doesn’t the proposed Shaw taxing district exclude Flora Place specifically?
I think that Flora Place benefits unintentionally from the proposed Shaw taxing district in that it becomes surrounded by an extra police presence, and can therefore discontinue its own private police without any loss of services.
That’s a small deal for me, though.
My real concern is whether we can trust whomever ends up controlling this new police resource (if we do pass this tax) to use it in a meaningful way.
In my mind, Flora Place wasted their money having their private police patrols monitor the clients going into and out of Isaiah 58 Ministries food and clothing pantry in the basement of Compton Heights Christian Church at Flora and Grand. Clients are served 10 AM to 1 PM Monday through Friday, with an additional early morning produce pickup time on Fridays. The food pantry has been there since the 1960′s.
As far as I’ve heard the net result for Flora Place is that the private police gave a ticket to a guy who sat on the east retaining wall of the Flora Place home just west of the church. Now, none of the clients sit on that retaining wall.
Maybe this feels like important progress to Flora Place folk, but is that really the sort of outcome that we envision when we vote for or against our tax district? Don’t we envision catching burglars or catching kids stealing cars or preventing rapes?
Flora Place can have their private police do anything that they want, and perhaps this was meaningful for Flora Place – providing the ultimate in security at a food pantry.
I think the Flora Place experience points out that the weak link in any of these private police deals is the decision making group that says where the police are going to spend their time and your money. How do we do that well? If there are a string of burglaries on Castleman, for instance, how do we translate that into meaningful and timely action? If the proponents of the tax have a plan for this, that would be important to learn.
Thanks.
Dave,
For what it is worth, this is from the report issued by the Flora Place CID at their annual meeting. I think the fact that their crime was down 57% felt like progress to a lot of the folks on Flora.
Matt Davis
2007 Number of police reports issued
−Burglaries – 18
−Larcenies – 29
−Auto Theft – 6
Total 53
2008 Number of police reports issued
−Burglaries – 5
−Larcenies – 9
−Auto Theft – 2
−Other – 7 (3 – Destruction of Prop; 2 – Destitute; 2 –Dumping; 1 – Destitute; 1 – Hold up)
Total 23
Matt,
Thanks for the information. I’m sure that 57% would feel like a lot. It helps people feel better, and that’s not bad.
But is this a real reduction in crime or part of the normal statistical fluctuation? And if it is a real reduction, is it the result of the extra patrols or for some other reason?
In terms of the statistics, if crime on Flora Place in 2009 goes up from this lower 2008 level (or perhaps matches the level in the rest of Shaw) does that mean the extra security folks are somehow not doing their job as well as in 2008? Probably not. It just means that after a year that was an outlier on the low side, the average crime level returned toward the mean.
The problem is that we’re dealing with the statistics of small samples. If crime in Shaw as a whole dropped from 713 in 2007 to 551 in 2008(a 23% drop), then a 57% drop for a particular street in Shaw is well within statistical possiblity even if the extra security folks were not there.
I’d bet that the Flora Place crime improvement, if it is real, is more the result of Flora Place residents’ individual actions than the result of increased patrols.
For instance, isn’t the drop from 18 to 5 burglaries more likely to be the result of folks securing their property better rather than a result of extra security?
Besides, Flora Place already has extra help. I’ve seen that a police car patrols the street when there’s a power failure. When I painted at a Flora Place home three years ago, the police checked my truck plates and tags each day because they recognized it was out of place. So why is there more crime on Flora Place (which has this extra help) than on blocks like mine?
I know that my block, 3600 Russell, had a dramatic and permanent reduction in crime after we did two things:
1. We made our block unattractive to our local Bloods-affiliated gang by denying them darkness, mobility, and refuge. This included the block unit paying to have lights put on rental properties and paying to have gangways closed with locked gates for properties where the owners refused to pay for these improvements themselves.
2. We worked through Susan Turk and ultimately the city courts to get our one drug dealer’s home condemned. Of the 600 photos we had of the dealer’s activities it was the 40 photos of his illegal on-street auto repair business that lost him his home.
Did we get extra police patrols during the years we worked on this? Perhaps Susan knows, but I never saw extra patrols. The city attorney couldn’t even get the police to provide an officer to come to the court hearing to enter the 911 logs into evidence at the dealer’s nuisance property hearing.
I feel that there’s a real limit to the improvement we can get by adding more security. As corny as it seems, the real improvements come from our own intelligent actions and our caring for and about our neighbors.
Thanks.