The V.I. Police Department has hit upon a surprisingly simple approach to building trust and curbing crime in some of St. Croix’s most troubled communities: go door to door asking what residents’ biggest crime-related concerns are, then trying to address residents’ concerns right away.
About 20 officers with clipboards in hand fanned out across Aureo Diaz Heights apartments on Saturday, knocking on doors, introducing themselves, giving out candy, juice drinks, coloring books and trinkets, while asking for feedback on that neighborhood’s particular needs, said VIPD Information Officer Melody Rames Wednesday afternoon.
“House after house mentioned the broken streetlights and the overgrown bushes,” said Rames. “That is why we focused on those first.”
Based on their feedback, police arranged with the Public Works Department to bulldoze a swath of bush behind the apartments, demolishing a network of paths and hiding places where thieves and worse could come and go unseen. While that was being arranged, the Police Department worked with the Water and Power Authority and the Department of Housing, Parks and Recreation to fix streetlights over the public apartment complex’s nearly new playground.
“The neighbors said last night was the first time they had seen kids playing there at night,” said Rames.
At first, the residents were distrustful and even a little hostile, said St. Croix Deputy Police Chief Chris Howell. While no one was rude to their faces, some people jeered from a distance on the first day, he said. But now that they have interacted more, speaking directly with officers and seeing the new lights and the bulldozed brush, the response is growing warmer, he said.
Two young residents who spoke with reporters Wednesday were happy with the sprucing up, saying it made the neighborhood safer.
Before the brush was bulldozed back, creating a long open space with a tall berm of brush blocking all the old paths, residents could not put anything on their back porches, not even laundry, said a 19-year old resident named Gabriel.
“You couldn’t put anything out there or they would come steal it,” he said. “They thief my boxers and my shirts; they even thief the wooden pegs off the line. Now we will see anyone coming because they have got no more bushes to hide in. This is the best thing the Police Department ever did, for real.”
A 14-year-old male added, “It was good to cut the brush. People used to run and hide there whenever the police would come.”
At night, the bush and other outside areas around the apartments have not been very family-friendly over the years he has lived in Aureo Diaz, said the young man.
“They fuss and cuss and fight and throw dice, but there haven’t been any shootings so far,” the 14-year old said, sizing up his neighborhood’s level of safety.
While clearing brush earlier in the week, an officer noticed the door to an abandoned water tower by the apartment complex was ajar.
“Every kid we talked to had been up to the top of the water tower,” Howell said. “It is not in use. There is no guard rail at all on top. It has two cisterns on top, with two hatches, and no ladder so a child could fall in and they would never be able to get out if no one saw it happen. It’s a blessing that no one has fallen before.”
Neighborhood residents told him drug dealers and others would also use the tower to stand lookout and warn if the police were coming, Howell said.
So police arranged to have the door to the abandoned tower welded shut, he said. Police also noticed a lot of teenagers hanging around, so they went through with their own truancy officer and people from the Department of Education to find out what was happening and to get the kids back in school. That turned out to be a bit of a false alarm, as several of the children had been suspended from school, several more had notes to be home sick from school, and others turned out to be over 18, he said.
On Tuesday, brush clearing came to a temporary halt because of mechanical problems, so police took on the local kids in basketball, said Howell.
“I said at the time if I were a betting man, I’d bet on the Aureo Diaz kids over us,” said Howell. “It’s a good thing I’m not a betting man. You wouldn’t believe the action in that game, and my officers pulled it off.”
The work in Aureo Diaz follows on the heels of a similar effort in Lorraine Village Apartments in September. Brush clearing there uncovered more than a dozen malnourished and wounded dogs and more than 100 chickens living in unhealthy conditions. Police arrested 27-year-old Ravi Samuel and charged him with animal cruelty after he claimed ownership of the chickens.
“There were reports of shots fired in the bush around Lorraine Village almost every night,” Howell said. “But last I checked, there hasn’t been a single incident since the brush was cut.”
The department plans to keep up the effort, targeting one or two neighborhoods a month, said Rames.
“It’s an ongoing effort really,” she said. “We try to look at new approaches to problems we have, and this approach is not totally new to the world, but is something new for us and it seems to be working. We always have to be evolving in our approach to crime and crime prevention.”
