Laura Stadler was walking her two young children home from preschool and daycare, her daughter in a stroller and her son beside her. It was a sunny afternoon in March, and Stadler had just finished her first day back working as a dietician after returning from maternity leave. The family was on a crowded sidewalk on Bedford Avenue, approaching Clarkson Avenue, when shots rang out.
"It felt like the gunshots just kept happening, like they wouldn't stop," she said. "I had my son lie down on the sidewalk so I could cover the stroller better. It didn't feel safe enough to stand up and get an infant out of the stroller. But then I could lean my body over a little bit to provide a little coverage for [my daughter]."
The gunman ran as he fired, hitting two people and leaving a crime scene that spanned three police precincts. The March 23rd shooting was the third in the area in three days. The others left an 18-year-old dead and a one-year-old grazed by a stray bullet.
A group of neighbors, disturbed by the recent violence and persistent crime in the neighborhood and nervous about what summer might bring, met in the basement of a Clarkson Avenue apartment building on Monday night to talk about what can be done.
In the police precincts that cover Prospect-Lefferts Gardens and neighboring Crown Heights, major crimes are actually down from last year at this time, but shooting incidents have continued to rise.
Rebecca Fitting, one of the meeting's organizers and a co-owner of Greenlight Bookstore in Fort Greene, has lived in Prospect-Lefferts Gardens over the last eight years, and said that being a new mom changed the way she experienced the shooting in late March.
"I've lived in high-crime neighborhoods on and off most of my life but this is the first one where I have a kid," Fitting said, noting that she spent time in Memphis and Baltimore when each claimed the title of U.S. murder capital.
She was driving to pick up her son when the March 23rd shooting happened, and ended up right in the middle of it. She walked back with him through the aftermath.
"I had to explain to him why there's helicopters and why there's police and why streets are closed off," she said. "I don't want to have to explain that to a toddler on a regular basis."
About 45 residents turned out for the meeting, as well as representatives of the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office, Assembly candidate Diana Richardson, and Borough President Eric Adams. All three of the area's police precincts, the 67th, 70th, and 71st, told organizers that representatives were coming, but none showed. The 71st Precinct told organizers a representative was coming, and the 70th said it would try to send someone, but no police showed.
Borough President Eric Adams addresses the crowd packed into a Clarkson Avenue basement. (Nathan Tempey/Gothamist)
Residents raised a variety of questions, including whether one could legally withhold rent because of teenagers smoking weed in one's lobby, why police aren't canvassing to find the March 23rd shooter (see update below), and what could be done about the absentee landlord of 60 Clarkson Avenue, a building almost entirely rented to the city as a homeless shelter.
Most of the inquiry focused on what police are doing about young men and teenagers congregating in disruptive ways, and/or shooting each other, and most of the questions went unanswered because police weren't there.
Adams, a former cop, encouraged residents in attendance to form neighborhood watch groups, saying that the prioritization put on policing terrorism left slack for everyday New Yorkers to pick up, but that preventing terror attacks is as pressing as ever.
"The further we move from 9/11, many people believe it's all right," he said. "That's the reason they're called sleeper cells. They wait until we fall asleep and then they go out."
Adams also urged locals to map the drug corners and loitering-prone lobbies in the neighborhood and present their findings to the police, and he reiterated his support of Broken Windows policing. (Asked how he feels about a recent Council proposal to decriminalize several of the most common quality-of-life offenses, Adams called it a "good plan.")
Isis Sapp-Grant, who grew up in 60 Clarkson and works with at-risk girls, urged the group to involve neighborhood youth in any future efforts, and said she wasn't surprised by the NYPD's absence.
Fatima Gordon
"This block has a history with the precincts in the area. That's the reality," she said. "And it's not a good relationship that's been going on for the last, gosh, 30 years."
She recalled a police interaction she had on Clarkson back in 1993, in the weeks after a man killed an officer in Washington Heights with a bucket thrown off the roof of a six-story building:
"I was just coming on the block to go visit my mom, and I double-parked, and [the cop] was giving me a ticket. I said, 'We're pulling off,' and he said, 'You people killed one of us, and now we're going to make it hard.' That's unfortunately the mentality of a lot of the police officers who take care of the area. And it's also the mentality of a lot of people that live in the neighborhood."
Crime has dropped dramatically in the decades since and "a lot of new faces are coming in," Sapp-Grant said. But she noted that mutual distrust remains between the police and some residents, and the violence persists.
In 2012, a stray bullet killed 28-year-old mom Fatima Gordon on Clarkson Avenue, in the middle of a block party, in front of her 4-year-old son. Sapp-Grant babysat Gordon when she was a kid, and she was stunned by her death.
"It all comes around in a circle," she said.
Update 4:30 pm:
No one at the meeting seemed to know, but police arrested a 16-year-old named Michael Williams for on April 3rd in connection with the March 23rd shooting. He is facing a raft of charges, including two counts of attempted murder, which could carry sentences of 25 years each. Police, in a court document, say a second, unnamed suspect is at large. Williams was released without bail on April 9th, according to court records. His next court date is October 30th. Had officers shown up to last night's meeting, there would have been less mystery around this.
The story has also been updated to reflect word from an organizer that there was miscommunication about who would reach out to the 67th Precinct, and so the invitation may not have been extended, and that the 70th Precinct only said it would try to send someone, not that it definitely would.
