61 st Precinct Halloween Update

Update: Hello to the officers of the 61st Precinct who read this!

I attended the 61st Precinct Community Council meeting tonight. It was so much fun! Don’t get me wrong, I hate these meetings. They are long and boring, but this is how things get done and someone has to go.

The precinct didn’t have too much news to report. Captain Vincent G. Stella and his team have kept crime down for the most part; impressively, there was not one assault or stolen car for an entire week. However, purse snatching seems to be the trend during the before-and-after work rush. Women should be careful walking down side streets near busy train and/or bus stops.

After reading all of the responses on this site to the Halloween fiasco, I was expecting to see members of our community at the meeting to discuss/complain/demand answers about the police presence on Halloween. Everyone seemed so concerned about the kids in the neighborhood throwing eggs at the cops, damaging the bus shelters and being rowdy. People were complaining on this website that the cops didn’t do anything to disperse the huge crowd of teenagers or arrest anyone for vandalism. Isn’t anyone curious as to why the police responded the way that they did on Halloween? If we were a more vocal community maybe we would get some answers.

Not one person from Gerritsen Beach showed up at the meeting and Halloween wasn’t even mentioned.

Halloween in Gerritsen Beach was a major ordeal for the city: bus routes were changed, extra people were deployed to clean buses and repair bus shelters, and sanitation had to work extra hard to clean up all the egg shells. At the very least I was expecting some news of Halloween from the precinct, but because of the lack of attendance from the Gerritsen Beach community, the issue of Halloween/egg throwing was not even brought up. How is the 61st precinct supposed to know how we feel about them if no one showed up to tell them? For a neighborhood of loud, opinionated people, it’s surprising that no one cared enough to attend the meeting. It’s one thing to act like you care about Gerritsen Beach on a message board. But don’t act surprised when nothing gets done around here. It’s like no one actually cares what happens to the community.

After the meeting I got the feeling that our reputation as a community precedes us. Gerritsen Beach is a small community with one way in and one way out. Everyone knows everyone. We are close knit to the point of almost being cut off from the outside world. There are people who have lived here for ten years and still feel that they aren’t accepted as true residents. Although there is something comforting about the small-town feeling of Gerritsen Beach, we are not an island. We are part of a larger community in one of the biggest cities in the world. We are tax-paying, voting citizens and we NEED representation in the outside world or we will be forgotten about.

To get an idea of what the rest of the city thinks of us, listen to this: The NY Times & the police have said “the people of Gerritsen Beach have turned inward and wrapped themselves in silence.” “The people in the community are refusing to speak to the N.Y.P.D.,” and “We’ve never had this happen before in the city of New York.” How does that make you feel? We’ve turned inward and wrapped ourselves in silence?

If you could ask the 61^st Precinct a question about what they’re doing for Gerrtisen Beach, what would it be? What would you like to say to them about their performance?

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