A Crown Heights Neighborhood Patrol Enters Disputed Territory
It was nearly 11 p.m. when the patrol car edged north off of Kingston Avenue onto Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. The wedding party that earlier had monopolized the sidewalk in front of Lubavitch World Headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway had long since cleared out. On the African-American and Caribbean-American blocks to the north, the children were inside for the night and the streets were empty and quiet.
The patrol car looked just like an NYPD cruiser, except that its blue paint was a bit too light and the letters on the door read CHSP. Moe Dennis, a young African-American in an Adidas tracksuit jacket, recognized the car. It belonged to a Lubavitch neighborhood watch group called the Crown Heights Shmira Patrol. Standing with a group of acquaintances near the entrance to the Kingston Avenue subway station, Dennis watched as the car, yellow lights flashing, pulled out into the middle of Eastern Parkway and then continued north, to the black side of the neighborhood. Dennis shook his head. “That’s bullshit,” he said.
…
“Be advised – 51 and 52 are rolling in CH-1.”
Menachem puts down his two-way radio as Leib Skoblo presses the accelerator and the Ford Police Interceptor pulls slowly out onto Albany Avenue. Leib leans back in the worn seat, scanning the street in front of him as Menachem fiddles with the emergency lights.
The Interceptor, known in the radio code of the Crown Heights Shmira Patrol as CH-1, is Shmira’s flagship vehicle. It looks like a Crown Victoria but carries a slightly modified engine, a yellow light bar on the roof, a two-way radio base station, an air horn, and a vanity plate that reads CHSP. It also has a check engine light that’s always on and loose trim on the right side, so that the front and back doors catch on each other when opened.
On Jewish blocks, the car is a familiar sight, barely meriting a second glance as it makes the rounds from 7 p.m. until 11 p.m. each evening except Shabbos. And yet, as the community of Lubavitcher Hasidim that has lived in Crown Heights since the 1940s continues to grow at a staggering pace, CH-1 has begun to regularly cross Eastern Parkway, an unofficial frontier separating the black and Jewish segments of the neighborhood. In a neighborhood made famous by racial tensions that culminated in a 1991 riot, does the encroachment of a Jewish security patrol on traditionally black territory threaten to destabilize an uncertain peace?
A Local Patrol
At approximately 8:30 p.m., the radios in the patrol car crackle to life.
“24 to Central.” “Go Ahead.” “I’m holding this lady here regarding the call you passed on before about a lady with Alzheimer’s.” “Yeah, 10-4, what’s your location?”
The intersection is only a few blocks away, and Leib wheels the car around. A big man with a big beard, Leib has been with Shmira for 16 years. He once worked as a programmer, but now owns a janitorial services company. He is also a notary, an EMT, a certified real estate agent, and a father of three. “Jack of all trades, master of none,” he says.”
Leib is one of Shmira’s three coordinators. He said that the number of active Shmira volunteers is near one hundred. Most of the organization’s activity is focused on maintaining its emergency phone line. The average Hasidic resident of Crown Heights, when stopped on the street and asked the emergency number of Shmira rattles off the seven digits – 221-0303 – with the confidence of a child telling you to stop, drop, and roll. The number is routed to the home phones of individual units, who volunteer to answer for certain periods of the day. When a call comes in, a bulletin is broadcast over the radio system and nearby units respond.
The tools of the Shmira are limited. “€Neighborhood patrols act as eyes and ears of the Police Department,” says Detective Kevin Czartoryski of the NYPD’s press office. The law limits their role to one of an active observer. They cannot carry weapons, nor even batons. Their most potent tools are their cell phones, which they regularly use to call 911. If they find someone they believe to have committed a crime, they can make a citizen’s arrest like any other private individual. The citizen’s arrest is a risky tactic, however, for if the arrest is deemed baseless, the arresters can be prosecuted.
The danger of a mistaken arrest has led to some tense moments for Shmira. Once, Leib said, he was one of five units who responded to a call from the owner of Koshertown, a supermarket on Albany Avenue and Empire Boulevard, who said that he had a shoplifter in his store. Shoplifters are a frequent subject of calls to the emergency line, as some store owners have determined the Shmira to be more responsive than the Police Department. The units assembled outside to wait for the suspect to emerge. When he did, they surrounded him.
“The two officers that showed up were – how do I say it? – assholes,” Leib said. “They go through his pockets. Found nothing. We’re sitting over there sweating our balls off. If they’re not going to find anything on this guy, we could have problems.” He paused. “€œYou won’t believe it, but in his sweatpants, he had a lining, and he had baby formula bottles all the way up. They’re very expensive. Even when they patted him down on the outside they didn’t find it. It was very funny.”
“Never Again”
Eastern Parkway sits on the border of two police precincts. Lubavitch World Headquarters and most of Jewish Crown Heights lies within the 71st precinct. The northern side of the street and the mostly black neighborhoods beyond are under the jurisdiction of the 77th precinct. Over the past few years, Hasidic Jews from Crown Heights have begun to move in droves to a few outposts in the 77th, particularly along Lincoln Place and St. John’s Place, just north of Eastern Parkway. The moves are the result of a rapidly expanding Lubavitch population and mounting economic pressures which force Jews to seek housing away from the established Jewish blocks. In some ways, it is a familiar story in Brooklyn, where new and old populations have been forced together in neighborhoods all across the borough. In Crown Heights, however, the weight of local history bestows the changes with particularly worrying undertones.
Last year, when Shmira decided to begin patrolling Lincoln Place and St. John’s Place, Leib joined the NYPD Auxiliary in the 77th precinct. Although he had been working for years with the officers of the 71st, he knew practically no one at the 77th. “œWe were never on this side of Eastern Parkway,” Leib said. “€œNow that there are a lot of people moving on to this side, we need to start building up a relationship with the precincts.”
As Leib guides the Interceptor down the black blocks on the north side of Eastern Parkway, he doesn’t seem to notice the wary stares with which his vehicle is regarded. In fact, there is a long history of mistrust among the black residents of Crown Heights of organizations like Shmira and Hatzolah, the Jewish ambulance service that, like Shmira, aims to supplement city services for Jewish residents.
The organizations are seen as a symbol of the preferential treatment that the Hasidim are thought to receive, both from each other and from the City itself. When the Lubavitch first began to arrive in Crown Heights, the neighborhood was home to a diverse group of recent immigrants, including Italians and non-Hasidic Jews. The neighborhood began to change in the 1950s, when white flight led to plummeting property values and improved subway access brought significant numbers of African-Americans to the community. Among the white populations that had lived in Crown Heights, only the Lubavitch stayed. It didn’t take long for tensions to develop between blacks and Lubavitchers. In 1964, the first precursor to the Shmira was founded to provide added protection on Jewish blocks. Members of the black community thought that Jews already received extra protection. “On every Friday and Saturday night you can find patrol cars parked in front of their shuls,” said one black community activist in a January 9th, 1972 New York Times article. “€œBut you’ll never find them below Empire Boulevard.”
In 1987, a protest organized by students from nearby Medgar Evers College assembled approximately 400 blacks on a march through Crown Heights. According to an April 12, 1987 New York Times article, protesters complained that “œ[A] community surveillance patrol organized by the Hasidim had indiscriminately stopped blacks, demanding identification.”
And then, of course, there was the riot. On the night of August 19th, 1991, Yosef Lifsh was driving a station wagon in the rear of the motorcade carrying the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson. According to witnesses, Lifsh was speeding and talking on a cell phone when he ran a red light at the intersection of Utica Avenue and President Street. A collision with an oncoming car sent his station wagon careening onto the sidewalk, where it struck and killed a seven year old Guyanese boy named Gavin Cato. Upon exiting his vehicle, Lifsh was accosted and beaten by a mob. A Hatzolah ambulance arrived on the scene before the city ambulance, and in an attempt to defuse the anger of the growing crowd, police ordered the Hatzolah driver to take Lifsh and his passengers first. The black community was infuriated by the apparent unequal treatment. At Cato’s funeral, the Reverend Al Sharpton railed against Hatzolah. “[T]he world will tell us he was killed by accident,” Sharpton said. “Yes, it was a social accident…It’s an accident to allow an apartheid ambulance service in the middle of Crown Heights.”
Many Hasidim took a different lesson from the events of that August. In the three days and four nights that followed the accident, African-American and Caribbean-American residents of Crown Heights rioted, killing one ultra-Orthodox Jew, wounding Jewish residents and police officers, and burning and looting businesses. Mayor David Dinkins was accused by many of limiting the Police Department’s response to the riot. Although Dinkins admitted to tactical errors in police deployment, the charges that the police were actively restrained have never been substantiated. Nevertheless, a segment of the Hasidic population believes that they were abandoned by the City during those violent days.
“We were relying on the Police Department during the riot and we were let down,” said Leib. “It changed the neighborhood. It changed the kids who lived in the neighborhood.”
Menachem was one of those kids. His apartment was at the epicenter of the riots, on the very block where Cato was run down. “€œIt put memories in there that I remember until today,” he said. “I remember we walked over to a Police Officer to complain that we were getting rocks thrown at us, and the officer’s answer was, ‘˜Don’t walk the streets.'”
For these and other members of Shmira, the riots served as a call to action. “The motto of Shmira since then has been, we’ll never let this happen again,” said Leib. “It opened people’s eyes.”
Leib credits the lack of major disturbances over the past 16 years to a shift in the attitude of the Jewish community. He thinks that Shmira, which grew significantly in the wake of the riot, is a safeguard of the new status quo. “People realize that this is not the same old Crown Heights,” he said. “You can’t just do whatever you want and the Jewish community’s going to sit quiet. What’s changed? I think we don’t trust other people to handle it. It came to the point where we realized, ‘You burnt me, I’m never going to let this happen again.'”
The Lady with Alzheimer’s
Today, Menachem is 23 years old. He has only been with Shmira for six months. He joined after his wife was pelted with rocks while walking down Empire Boulevard and, in a separate incident, his brother was hospitalized after a particularly brutal mugging. He is green and eager, and as the Interceptor approaches the intersection where the presumed Alzheimer’s patient had been spotted, he jumps out to join Unit 24.
The bewildered-looking woman had been observed earlier in the day walking aimlessly and complaining that she felt ill. When 24 found her, he was hoping to find out who she was in order to contact her family.
Menachem and a gathering crowd of Shmira units sit the woman down and call 911 as Leib waits in the car. Soon, a city ambulance arrives on scene. When the EMTs attempt to take the woman with them, she refuses. The Shmira units grow agitated and try to explain that the woman had been complaining earlier about heart palpitations. The woman, switching manically between rapid fire Hebrew and heavily accented English, begins to ramble about a dispute with her landlord while continuing to insist that she will not go to the hospital. Soon, the EMTs leave, and Unit 91 convinces her to walk with him in the direction of her apartment.
Meanwhile, Menachem has called the landlord, a man named Fischer who is known to all of the units. Fischer says that the woman hasn’t lived at the apartment in six months. No one knows what to do. Unit 91 is already blocks away. Everyone shrugs. It’s the eternal predicament of the neighborhood watch – plenty of information, but nothing to do with it. Having decided to leave the situation in 91’s hands, the units disperse.
Across Eastern Parkway
On the African-American and Caribbean-American blocks across Eastern Parkway, many of the old suspicions live on. Still, the arrival of Shmira is not dismissed out of hand. “€œIf they’re going to help the neighborhood, there’s nothing wrong with it,” said Tina Cleckle, who lives on the north side of Crown Heights. “I welcome them over, if they’re gonna look after the whole community and not just their own.”
All members of Shmira claim to look out for both blacks and Jews while on patrol. Supporting these claims is the 2002 effort on the part of Shmira coordinator Yossi Stern and Garry Sanders, a black community activist, to organize the Crown Heights Safety Patrol, a joint force consisting of Hasidic and black members. The effort received coverage in the Daily News, but, says Stern, “lost steam.”
Moe Dennis, who has lived in Crown Heights for more than twenty years, is not convinced. He thinks that the very fact that Shmira are only crossing Eastern Parkway now that Jews are living on both sides disproves any stated intention of protecting the entire neighborhood. “He only goes over there because there are Jews there now, but there’s been people over there,” Dennis said. “People are people. It’s something he should have done before.”
Dennis’ complaint harkens back to the darkest moments of the relationship between blacks and Jews in Crown Heights. If the Shmira’s presence on traditionally black blocks resurrects the feelings of unequal treatment that were at the heart of the rioter’s grievances in 1991, the neighborhood may be headed for trouble.
For now, however, good will is easy to find on both sides. Says Tina Cleckle, standing with friends on Kingston Avenue on a warm summer night, “If they want to come hang out, they’re welcome.”
