It was quite the scene at the emergency meeting of the Jordan Park Neighborhood Association on Sept. 6. Inside the Wildwood Recreation Center, 17 of St. Petersburg Police Department's top brass — including Chief Chuck Harmon, assistant chiefs Luke Williams and Cedric Gordon, and all manner of majors and sergeants — stood before 60 concerned residents of the Wildwood and Jordan Park neighborhoods who were demanding relief from the spate of shootings and burglaries plaguing the area.
Chief Harmon was in rare form, commented one attendee, assuaging fears and pledging to work with neighbors to decrease crime.
"When will you patrol through our neighborhood?" one woman sitting in the back of the room asked, to which he responded, "They started two days ago."
The last time this much brass showed up to a neighborhood meeting was earlier this year in Allendale; some might say it was a needed bit of damage control. The city's 20th homicide, and third in a week, had occurred earlier that day in broad daylight. (Since then, the city's 21st has been recorded.) Neighborhood leaders are again voicing their frustration with the city's crime-fighting efforts, or lack thereof. And later this month, Harmon is expected to face the city's Public Safety Committee to provide a response to the Matrix report, a survey of police officers commissioned by the City Council that revealed major discontent within the department (see "St. Pete Politics' Third Rail," May 23).
The story isn't new — residents have been lamenting the dwindling number of police officers and a perceived increase in criminals' brazenness for years. And accusations of a city administration in denial have become louder throughout the year as Mayor Rick Baker refuses to address crime issues publicly. Now a St. Petersburg Times editorial has added to citizens' sense that their concerns (and their own anti-crime efforts) are being ignored .
In a Sept. 10 commentary, the Times editorial board shifted the blame of recent violence onto the city's black communities. "Until residents begin to assist the police in preventing violent crime and catching killers, the city's black neighborhoods will remain depressed."
That potshot was the final salvo for some neighborhood leaders who have been working hard to engage their residents, start crime watch programs and, in at least one case, police their own neighborhood (see "Policing Ourselves," July 25).
"I think they're putting the onus on the people," says a livid Wengay Newton, president of the Westminster Heights Neighborhood Association. "People can only do so much. They don't have badges. They don't have 9mm [guns]. Putting the emphasis back on the people is wrong."
Bartlett Park's neighborhood association vice president Scott Swift agrees. He says residents are doing their part; in his neighborhood alone, calls for police service have increased 133 percent this year. And yet residents aren't seeing more patrols, at least outside of Jordan Park.
Philip Gailey, the Times' editor of editorials, did not respond by deadline to requests for comment on the residents' reactions.
The SPPD is still in the throes of an attrition problem that is sapping the department of its most experienced officers while failing to retain its new recruits (see "Only As Safe As You Feel," Aug. 23, 2006). The latest numbers from the SPPD show an ongoing, disturbing trend: 46 officers have left the department this year through retirement, resignation or termination — more than any other year during the same eight-month period.
"The people talk about it all the time in this community — the government doesn't care," Swift says. "The mayor's recognition of the crime problem might enhance and increase the tips and information from the community to solve these unsolved murders."
Against this background of perceived government indifference, one neighborhood has taken its crime watch a step further. After a series of violent crimes in the Jungle Terrace neighborhood — a carjacking, a stabbing murder and a child molestation case — residents are looking into starting a handgun club.
"These kind of things didn't used to happen in our neighborhoods," says Ed Carlson, who has pushed for the idea of an armed citizenry. "[The police] say we only have 74 violent crimes [in the neighborhood]. What do you mean only?"
Carlson says a small group of residents are pursuing plans to apply for concealed-gun permits and practice at a local shooting range.
"Where the police step out, somebody has to step in," he says, "or the bad guys step in."
This article appears in Sep 19-25, 2007.