When armed citizens patrol the streets

The Edgewood neighborhood near downtown New Haven, Conn., is probably one of the last places you'd expect to find residents patrolling the streets with pistols.

Turn-of-the-century carriage houses sport manicured lawns. Tall elm trees really do line Elm Street. And every night since youths beat up a rabbi's son three weeks ago, members of the newly formed Edgewood Park Defense Patrol (EPDP) have been walking the streets at night. Roughly half of them have permits to carry concealed weapons and take a handgun on patrol.

Although there's nothing illegal about the practice, this ratcheting up of a traditional neighborhood watch worries local officials and national experts. Citizens rarely, if ever, have the training that police routinely receive to defuse volatile situations. But as budget woes and other priorities cause some localities to cut back neighborhood police patrols, advocates say that stepped-up citizen policing is an understandable response – although it's a risky one with guns.

Longtime residents say Edgewood was a peaceful place until the 1980s, when residents started moving out to the suburbs and drugs and prostitution moved in. The situation started to improve in the late 1990s, in part due to neighborhood revitalization projects and New Haven police working closely with the community, says Avi Hack, a high school teacher and EPDP spokesman. But about five years ago, officers who used to work with Edgewood were reassigned – something Mr. Hack blames on the police chief – and "gangs of marauding youth" began harassing the neighborhood, he says.

After working with a variety of city officials and seeing no results, Hack says, "at a certain point we felt the only way to put the pressure on the mayor to either dismiss the police chief or get the police chief to do his job, which he seems incapable or unwilling to do, and ensure our own security was to form EPDP."

In an act of apparently random violence earlier this month, a group of youths attacked a local rabbi's adult son in his own home. Shortly afterward, members of the Jewish community along with some local African-Americans and others formed the EPDP.

On this particular night, Hack and Gary Lynes — a retired musician – are on an hour-long patrol in matching black EPDP T-shirts.

"I'm with you 100 percent!" shouts Tina Salters as the two pass by. Down the street, they're met with a scowl from Nancy Brown. "The police are working real hard and they don't need no one else coming out here with guns." Hack and Lynes don't carry guns.

Despite the EPDP criticism heaped on him, Chief Francisco Ortiz, a staunch advocate of community policing, says he "wholeheartedly" supports EPDP, though he made a point of officially not supporting their decision to carry weapons on patrol. He says neighborhood police patrols were reduced largely due to funding cuts.

Page: 1 | 2