PROJECT TRUST
Police work to improve ties with NYCHA tenants
Officers Francesco Ingoglia (r.) and Krunal Patel (c.) talk with Alana Pilgrim about conditions at the Red Hook Houses, where community policing is working to build trust among residents.
The unlikely police tipster, pushing a baby stroller through the Red Hook Houses, paused to lower her voice.
“There’s an apartment that is vacant and they are doing drugs and they have sex in there,” the woman told Krunal Patel, an NYPD neighborhood coordination officer, and his partner, Officer Francesco Ingoglia. “I told management about the needles they stick up there, and they took them. I have a child, and these little kids are running up and down and they don’t need that.”
At the urging of Patel, assigned to an NYPD Housing Bureau unit, the woman agreed to text him the address.
It’s the kind of intelligence that can jump-start cases, and the NYPD says it’s flowing more freely as the department works to restore trust with minority communities scarred by an era of unchecked stop-and-frisk and what many saw as policing by numbers.
Jennifer Bozeman, 32, is among those still skeptical.
“They’re not good to us,” griped the teacher and Gowanus Houses resident, several hours after Patel’s encounter on June 20. “Community policing is supposed to be walking around, learning a neighborhood. They don’t learn us in this neighborhood. When they come down, we’re already criminals in their eyes.”
NYPD crime statistics don’t necessarily support her sentiment.
With a focus on known criminals — what the NYPD calls precision policing — cops citywide are making fewer arrests and issuing fewer summonses. Last year, arrests dropped 14%, to 246,800 from 286,200 in 2017, and criminal court summonses dropped 46%, to 89,900 from 165,100 in 2017.
Police Service Area 1 — based in Coney Island with a satellite headquarters in Red Hook — serves NYCHA projects in six Brooklyn police precincts. It accounted for 1,336 arrests in 2018 from 1,704 in 2017, and 310 criminal court summonses last year compared with 758 in 2017.
But as a team of Daily News reporters discovered after spending a day with the housing police of PSA 1, perceptions are hard to change.
Case in point: Elsewhere on June 20, Police Service Area 1 Lt. Vincent Varriano and other officers were targeted on Coney Island’s Surf Ave. by passers-by intent on getting cell phone video of a wrongful arrest.
The only problem: There was no arrest. It was just a street scuffle, with one of the combatants declaring his intention to commit the neighborhood’s first homicide of 2019. Cops defused the volatile situation.
Five hours later, concerned that a bad rumor had shot around Coney Island, Varriano explained the incident to a group, mostly tenant leaders, gathered for the monthly community council meeting at a YMCA.
“Everybody starts screaming and yelling at us because they only saw us approaching him,” Varriano said. “You can record us all you want, but we’re just doing our jobs. So just spread the word, you guys see us out there, just try to let them know that we’re here to help.”
Deputy Inspector Tania Kinsella nodded approvingly.
For the past 14 months, Kinsella has commanded PSA 1, which patrols 19 housing projects stretching from Red Hook to Canarsie in Brooklyn. Until recently, Capt. Besemah Rogers was her second-in-command. It was the first time two black women headed an NYPD housing command. Rogers has been transferred to a housing command in a higher crime area.
Kinsella, a Bronx-born, 16year NYPD veteran, said the primary goals remain unchanged: fight crime, prevent crime. The new twist is the neighborhood coordination officer program, which theoretically gives cops a better chance of doing both. A merchant’s complaints about teens hassling customers, for example, can be addressed before a situation evolves into something criminal.
With The News watching, Kinsella met to talk strategies with Varriano, Field Intelligence Sgt. Sheldon Arrindell and anti-crime Sgt. Sean Dawson.
Crime in PSA 1 is down 24% through the first six months of this year, with 164 serious crimes compared to 215 last year. There has not been a single murder in the area in 2019. “It’s necessary to
address all the issues, whether crime is high or low,” Kinsella said, “Any condition can turn into a big problem.”
Each day brings its own challenges. Kinsella dispatched extra patrols to nearby Public School 188, scene of a brawl between a student’s father and stepfather just 24 hours earlier.
While school dismissal passed without incident, parent Mohammed Rahman, 42, said the real challenge is running the gamut of troublemakers assembled at the nearby Surfside Gardens project, once the home of former Knicks star Stephon Marbury.
On Surfside’s grounds, three teens walked past a reporter. One flashed gang signs. A second fingered his waistband, suggesting he was armed.
“This is the ghetto,” explained a man playing dominoes nearby. “And you never feel safe in the ghetto.”
Kinsella met later in her office with a dozen neighborhood coordination officers assigned to projects in her command. Working from her iPad, she quizzed the cops about an assortment of issues: a grand larceny in the Dwyer Houses, a crime victim from Carey Gardens too scared to leave his home and look at surveillance video, a concern that NYCHA residents will flout the rule prohibiting barbecues, an ongoing dispute between two tenants. What, she asked, were her officers doing about each?
The Neighborhood Policing program by design reduces the time neighborhood officers spend responding to 911 calls. Some cops have grumbled that officers swamped with 911 calls in busy precincts are now even busier. But the police believe that by making neighborhood coordination officers problem solvers, the number of 911 calls will ultimately drop.
After the meeting, Kinsella headed to the Carey Gardens Community Center and then to the Coney Island I Sites 4/5, a connected three-building complex that can be confusing to navigate.
Kinsella and several officers conducted a roof-tolobby vertical patrol, looking for signs of trouble or troublemakers. On the eighth floor, police couldn’t unlock a door to the hallway, setting off alarm bells.“That needs to get fixed today,” Kinsella told an officer. “That’s a hazard for everyone.”
Kinsella, a mother of two and wife of a cop, prides herself on taking time every day to hit the books — reading every report generated by a crime or a complaint. She also said it’s important to know the tenant leaders at each of the projects patrolled by PSA 1 officers.
The day ended with no felonies and three arrests: two for misdemeanor assault and one for violating an order of protection.
Kinsella sleeps with her cell phone at her side. She has told tenants to call her if necessary, and like most commanders insists on immediate word of a serious crime regardless of the hour.
Not far from the Y, in a courtyard at the Coney Island Houses, Julio Santiago, 51, praised the newer version of the NYPD: “You give them respect, they give you respect.”
He, too, is skeptical of statistics showing crime at low levels not seen since 10 years before his birth. His leeriness is based on experience: Santiago survived a July 5, 2018, bullet as a bystander to a drive-by shooting at W. 30th St. and Surf Ave. No one was arrested.
“Thank God, I’m still alive,” he said. “Thank God, it went in and out.”