The role of private citizens, both acting alone and through neighborhood associations, in keeping their area safe from crime was the subject of a meeting of the South Avenue Neighborhood Association held at the Busy Bee Cafe at 138 South Ave. on Aug. 18.
Mayor John Tkazyik, Police Chief Ronald Knapp, City Administrator Michael Long and Sgt. Richard Wilson presented updates and their views on this enduring community topic.
All of the public servants acknowledged that the tough economic times and the resulting budget crunches at the city, state and federal levels were going to affect crime rates and the amount of resources available to deal with lawlessness, and stressed that the best answer to this quandary was greater public cooperation with the police.
“The state is facing a $6 billion budget deficit,” Tkazyik said. “We’re keeping our fingers crossed as to what monies may be pulled from our city projects. It’s going to be a ripple effect, affecting us on all levels.”
“We are in the community service business,” said Long. “We really need to know from you what services we should be providing. It’s not enough to look back, saying, ‘We used to be a great industrial center, we used to have a great neighborhood.’ You really have to look at where you want to go over the next generation.”
In his remarks, Knapp emphasized that the public’s involvement in its own safety is not only supplementary to the work of the police, but is often crucial to stopping crime.
“The big thing is to have involvement with your neighborhood,” Knapp said. “We’ll guarantee the response time; what we need is citizen participation. Bad guys aren’t caught by the cops on routine patrol – they’re caught when an alert neighbor notifies us that something is wrong.”
Discussing the recent prevalence rates of different crimes, Knapp noted that in recent years there had been a large increase of thefts of copper and other metals to be re-sold as scrap. He said the incidence had become alarmingly high, up to two or three a week or even every day in some periods. He credited a recent resolution by the Common Council, which called on the county Legislature to tighten controls at scrap metal dealerships, and the attendant publicity, with leading to a turnaround in the situation.
“Cut it off where the people are selling it, and it’s going to change things,” he said. “Since we publicized it, the buyers have begun to feel the heat, and have begun to regulate themselves. Since then copper thefts have dropped down to nothing.”
Yet he lamented that vehicle entries remained a serious problem, and said that this was mainly due to a lack of common caution by car owners.
“As long as people keep leaving CDs, pocketbooks, etc. in plain view in their cars, we’re going to have these break-ins.”
One woman asked Knapp whether money was going to be available to organize neighborhood patrols by the police on a regular basis. He responded that areas would be more intensely patrolled as determined by whether they were “hot” – places which were the origin of many calls to the police. And he added that calls are something the City of Poughkeepsie Police always follow through on.
“If you call 911, even if you hang up or say everything is all right, the police are going to come over and confirm that,” he said.
Wilson, of the Community Policing section, gave a rundown of what his officers were concentrating on, and where.
“Main Street is very busy, Academy Street is busy,” he said. “We’re pushing very hard on gun arrests, and putting pressure in the housing complexes. The good thing as far as you residents are concerned is there is a collaboration with the Poughkeepsie Housing Authority – that frees our patrols to be elsewhere.”
Knapp concluded his remarks by emphasizing that community involvement in crime-fighting cannot be a sporadic thing.
“A lot of time people form neighborhood groups as a response to specific problems, then they disband when the problem has been dealt with. It’s the retention of people in the meetings that’s important. Resources for the next couple of years are going to be tight, so it’s important to get people involved.”