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Police to community: Protect yourselves
Kensington and Fishtown residents are angry with a recent rash of crime and blatant underage drinking. Police say residents need to step up.
Police to community: Protect yourselves
Capt. Mike Cram of the 26th District said the town hall meeting listed for last night on his website was a scheduling error, and the Cione Rec on Aramingo Avenue was booked for a gymnastics class. As a result, the 50 or so Fishtown, Port Richmond and Kensington residents huddled outside on the playground waiting for Cram to arrive, explaining: "I was over in North Philly. I've got a little drug war going on over there. Between that and Occupy Philly it's killing us."
Locals are angry about the recent shooting death of Shane Kelly, whose alleged killer then ran into a property widely known in the neighborhood as a nuisance house. They're also fired up about a newspaper article that quoted Cram as saying that a total of 18 911 calls made about the house in the past two years "doesn’t even register on the radar as far as nuisance properties go."
"I've heard a lot of excuses from the police, saying we're not calling in issues enough," said Leo Mulvihill, who lives nearby. "We're trying, and we feel that the 26th isn't listening to what we have to say. There's only so many times you can have an unanswered 911 call before you resign yourself to the situation."
Cram continued his call on residents to step up their own efforts to document nuisance properties. "This isn't TV.... This isn't the Rizzo days when we have 8,000 cops roaming around," he said, informing neighbors that there are only three cars patrolling a given Police Service Area in the 26th at any given time. So what does it take to get a nuisance house busted? Cram gives the example of one on the 2400 block of Jasper Street, had 200-plus 911 calls, photo documentation, and signed affidavits from neighbors. "We can't see everything. We need help." He said he's busted 20 to 25 nuisance houses in the past two and a half years.
Neighbors also asked Cram why he declined to crack down on large groups of children drinking beer outside a rec center just around the corner from the police station, or on underage keg parties being held almost weekly at the Conrail property at Richmond and Cumberland — a.k.a. the new satellite Occupy Philly location. Cram said that short of calling in helicopters, a marine unit and every cop in his district, he couldn't bust the parties without risking kids perishing in the river. As an alternative, he suggested neighbors go down to the parties themselves to discourage the youths.
AJ Thomson, of the Philly District Attorney's Public Nuisance Task Force, suggested that groups of 150 neighbors gather outside a property as a show of vigilance. "There's no end to the drug problem in this city," he said. "The best you can hope is to move it off your block."
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