Global Courant
NEW YORK — It had been a quiet April afternoon when a dozen or so teenagers started running down Pitkin Avenue in Brownsville, screaming and cursing. They were after a girl of about 14 years old and it was clear that they wanted a fight.
Five plainclothes police officers watched suspiciously. On the other side of Pitkin stood half a dozen men, civilians in jeans and purple-and-gray sweatshirts.
“They’ve got it,” said an officer.
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The teens slowed down when they saw the men, workers from an organization called Brownsville In Violence Out, who calmly waved them in different directions. They dispersed as the girl fled into a side street.
The brief encounter involved a simple but unorthodox concept at the heart of a bold experiment that organizers believe could redefine law enforcement in New York: letting neighbors, not the police, respond to petty street crime.
Several times a year, Brownsville In Violence Out workers stand guard on two blocks for five days. The police channel all 911 calls from that area to the citizens. Unless there is a major incident or a victim demands an arrest, officers, always in plain clothes, follow the workers.
The citizens have no powers of arrest. But they’ve persuaded people to turn in illegal guns, prevented shoplifting, stopped a man from robbing a bodega, and stopped a pregnant woman from hitting a friend who didn’t buy a car seat and stroller as he promised.
They are part of the Brownsville Safety Alliance, a group of neighborhood and city groups, police officers, and members of the Kings County District Attorney’s Office that work to reduce the number of people arrested and entangled in the criminal justice system.
While the men and women of Brownsville In Violence Out look forward to chaos, agencies offering services such as free childcare and addiction treatment sit at folding tables, hand out pamphlets and lure passersby with games, stress balls and pens.
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Over the next three years, the city will provide $2.1 million to help connect the local organizations most participating in the Safety Alliance so they can work cohesively throughout the year.
The effort echoes others that have sprung up following demonstrations in New York and much of the country to protest the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. They are intended to modulate the use of officially sanctioned violence, using a neighborhood’s innate desire for order as its tool.
Residents have embraced the concept, said Nyron Campbell, 37, assistant program manager at Brownsville In Violence Out.
“They say, ‘We feel safer. We can walk without feeling fear,” he said. “While they know we need police, it is possible that we can police ourselves.”
The idea came from Terrell Anderson, who took over as commander of the area’s 73rd Precinct in 2020. Growing up in Brownsville, he vowed to rebuild the precinct’s relationship with a distrustful community.
Residents had complained that officers had become aggressive and grabbed men off the street to arrest them for minor offences. The neighborhood was reeling from the 2019 shooting of Kwesi Ashun, a T-shirt salesman with paranoid schizophrenia, who was killed when he waved at an officer with a chair at a nail salon.
Anderson asked residents what the department could do to build trust.
Among them was Dushoun Almond, a funny and self-deprecating person who goes by the nickname Bigga.
Almond, who runs Brownsville In Violence Out, said Anderson realized that sometimes all it takes to keep the peace is a person with credibility — not necessarily a badge — telling someone, “Get out of here. You are eavesdropping.’”
“Community members see themselves in Bigga,” said Jeffrey Coots, director of the From Punishment to Public Health initiative at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. The group works closely with the Brownsville Safety Alliance, conducting surveys on the initiative and monitoring its progress.
“This is someone who is like me, who understands me and scolds me about being a little out of my pocket,” Coots said.
Deputy Superintendent Mark A. Vazquez, who also grew up in Brownsville, took over last year after Anderson transferred, saying he continued the project because public safety is “shared responsibility.”
Vazquez said he was 4 when his father was shot and many family members are incarcerated.
“I know what it’s like,” Vazquez said.
Not everyone is convinced. Lise Perez, owner of Clara’s beauty parlor on Pitkin Avenue, has 26 cameras in her store and works behind a counter protected by a thick plastic wall. No one can get in or out without pushing a button.
“No one feels too safe in this area,” she said. “We’re all surviving here.”
The idea of five days of police redirecting 911 calls disturbs her.
“It’s like they left us without protection,” she said. “It gives me no peace.”
But Minerva Vitale, 66, who lives on the avenue, said the effort was “incredibly important.”
“We call them and, poof, they come right away,” she said. “Do you think they’re not ready for this? Yes that are they.”
Tiffany Burgess, 42, one of the Brownsville In Violence Outreach outreach workers, said she was baffled by the skeptics.
“If we can calm them down and let them walk away, what’s the problem?” she said. “You should want that.”
More people across the country are doing that. The Brownsville Initiative is part of a movement called the “community responder model,” which aims to reduce the use of armed officers to handle many calls.
Similar programs are underway in Eugene, Oregon; Denver; Rochester, New York; and other places, according to the Center for American Progress, a left-wing think tank. The group estimates that nearly 40% of calls to the police can be handled by community responders.
In Brownsville, the effort not only gives residents more say in what public safety looks like, but could deter crime if people know there are more eyes watching, Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said.
“Many people worry that if police systems are not fully operational, crime will increase,” he said.
But the Safety Alliance is thriving amid a positive trend in the 73rd Precinct, Gonzalez said. In the first half of this year, homicides fell 50%, shootings fell 25%, and grand thefts from cars also fell, as they did in other neighborhoods, he said.
A pair of watchful eyes belongs to 47-year-old Almond, a former gang member who served more than 13 years in prison for bank robbery. He returned to Brownsville in 2014 and got a tattoo of a smoking gun behind his right ear to hide a small scar from a bullet wound.
His past, along with his calm, straightforward approach, helps him navigate conflict. During a Safety Alliance week, he persuaded a man who entered a bodega with a gun to give him his gun and go home. The next day the same man returned, but this time as a volunteer.
He spent the day squashing beef, Almond said. “He broke up like three fights.”
Just as he was telling the story, a 911 call came in about a fight at a sandwich shop on the corner of Watkins Street and Pitkin. Almond slowly walked over to assess the dispute between two men – one of whom had issued a restraining order against the other, a person named Lala.
Lala had disappeared, but the other man remained standing outside the deli.
“From now on, so that there will never be such problems in our community again, call me,” Almond said to the man, who nodded. “Go to the store. Don’t stop each other.”
Almond then told one of the street workers to find Lala and order him to stay away.
Almond walked over to Sgt. Jared Delaney and Agent Nickita Beckford.
“It’s all good,” he said. “I took care of it.”
The workers are taking on a heavy burden, handling cases that fall into the gaping gulf between law enforcement and social services.
On the penultimate day of Safety Alliance week, a chilly, overcast Friday, a car stopped. The driver pushed a woman into the street and then drove off. Crying, screaming and drunk, she had no money or identification and didn’t seem to know where she was.
Almond’s team surrounded her. Burgess learned her name was Alicia and it was her 23rd birthday. She told Burgess she had paranoid schizophrenia and insisted on going to Rite Aid. Burgess feared she was planning to steal something.
Dana Rachlin, executive director of We Build the Block, a Brooklyn-based public safety organization that helps run the alliance, bought Alicia some Chinese food to calm her down. While eating her meal, Rachlin called the city’s mental health hotline.
She waited on hold for 10 minutes until someone told her it would take 24 hours for a team to arrive and she could call the police.
Rachlin rolled her eyes and hung up.
It was getting colder. Rachlin sat on the bench at the bus stop and Alicia sat down next to her, rested her head on her shoulder and fell asleep.
Finally, Rachlin and Almond and a social services executive took Alicia to a shelter for shelter. She couldn’t get a bed until Monday, but she could stay downtown for the weekend.
When Rachlin called the center the next morning to check on her, Alicia was gone.
“We’ve been looking for her,” Rachlin said. “We have our eyes open.”
She said the ultimate goal was to close that gap and create a system where someone like Alicia, who may have been arrested for fighting or shoplifting, can immediately get shelter, cash and an ID.
At least on that Friday, Rachlin said, the alliance provided “a moment of security.”
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