Residents educate police at Quinn forum

Volume One, Issue 24, March 2 - March 8, 2007

Chelsea Now photo by Robin Langsdorf
Oscar Pagoada, who spoke at City Council Speaker Christine Quinn’s police forum Tuesday night, is all smiles after receiving Hudson Guild’s 2006 Youth Achievement Award.

By Chris Lombardi

Oscar Pagoada, winner of the Hudson Guild’s 2006 Youth Achievement Award, stood at the mic at the McBurney YMCA on Tuesday night and spoke softly.

“I may not look it,” said the 16-year-old with his hair in cornrows, “but I’m an A student. I organize youth groups. I’m also being targeted by the police.”

Pagoada, who won the award after years working in the Guild’s Beacon counseling program while achieving in school and athletics, went on to describe being ordered by police to leave the public park near where he lives, at the Fulton Houses on West 17th Street.

“I’ve been through the [police and jail] system, even though I didn’t do anything,” he told a panel that included Manhattan South’s new borough chief, James Tuller, Chief Ziegler of the NYPD Public Affairs Office and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn.

The Tuesday night forum was the fourth such gathering called by Speaker Quinn’s office in the wake of the November shooting of Sean Bell in Brooklyn. “We’ve had one in Harlem, one in Queens, one in the Bronx,” said Quinn, who was perched next to fellow Councilmember Alan Gerson and the two police chiefs. Chief Ziegler had also brought along representatives from the transit and housing police. All were there to listen, they said, while residents came forward and asked for changes.

In addition to the charges of profiling by “cowboy cops,” Hell’s Kitchen residents came out in force to ask for equal treatment by traffic police, while other downtown residents added concerns about prostitution, civil liberties, and the need for overall communication between police and neighborhoods so that residents don’t feel forced to deploy outside advocates.

“I am so tired of Al Sharpton,” said Denise Davis, who lives in the shelter at the Henry Street Settlement. “Please do something so that we don’t have to go through him again.”

Before young Pagoada told his story, Miguel Acevedo, director of the youth group Fulton Youth of the Future, painted the scene: “In the afternoons, [youth] have no place to go. There are no after-school programs, but the cops tell them they can’t be in the parks. We also have the situation where young adults are told they can’t be there without a child,” he added.

Racial profiling often happens in the wake of crimes, said Acevedo, stating that in the wake of a New Years’ Day assault at a nearby housing development, “the suspect was described as an African-American, around 5 foot, 6 inches. But they were holding a young man who was African American — and six foot four!”

Alan Gerson asked both Acevedo and young Pagaoda, “Would it help if the police chiefs came and talked to the youth, got to know them?” When told yes, Quinn, Gerson and the chiefs took furious notes.

The need to get to know the kids in the projects, and the adults on the surrounding blocks, was underscored by Jimmy Pelsey, president of the Fulton Houses Tenants Association, who asked for the return of the Housing Police substation in his community, and for more street patrols.

“When they see the blue, they know you’re out there,” he said.

“Getting to know the community” was a theme of much of the forum, a theme echoed by every single forum they had held, said Quinn. “Beat cops, community policing…we hear it everywhere. We heard it last week, when we met with leaders of the religious community, too.”

That same plea was echoed by several of the numerous Hell’s Kitchen residents who spoke at the forum, many of whom were shaken by recent deaths on Ninth Avenue: Last Friday, a 55-year-old pedestrian with a walker was hit at the corner of 45th Street and Ninth Avenue, while a young woman was critically injured on Monday at the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel at 37th Street. In both cases, pointed out Christine Berthet of the Clinton/Hell’s Kitchen Pedestrian Safety Coalition (CHEKPEDS), the drivers walked away with only a summons and weren’t questioned further.

“Ninety percent of Hell’s Kitchen residents are walkers,” said Berthet, who is also co-chair of Community Board 4’s Transportation Planning Committee. “They’re scared. And they feel discriminated against by the traffic police.”

Berthet pointed out that in a recent survey conducted by the Project for Public Spaces, a nonprofit urban planning and design organization, 75 percent of Hell’s Kitchen residents said they are afraid for their lives because of car traffic, while only 7 percent are afraid of crime.

“That shows you’re doing a great job on crime,” she said, going on to urge more training for traffic agents who, she charged, often “think their job is simply to facilitate traffic” and not to also protect pedestrians.

As an example, Berthet told of a traffic agent at a Ninth Avenue crossing who “looked at me, at my sneakers, and said, ‘Well you’re not in a rush. Why don’t you let the working people through first…. The assumption was that since I was a pedestrian, I wasn’t a working person. Everyone here is a working person, and they all walk,” she said to applause.

Berthet’s concerns were echoed by five or six other Hell’s Kitchen speakers, while others had less timely, but just as deeply felt, concerns. Several pedicab operators spoke to protest the new pedicab regulations about to be voted on by the Council, while other attendees railed against the new parade restrictions already adopted by the NYPD.

Meanwhile, residents from the Village to Clinton spoke of the ongoing problem of prostitution.

David Poster, of the Christopher Street Patrol, an all-volunteer group working with the Sixth Precinct and the Guardian Angels, said that police were doing all they could under the law about prostitution, and that in general the NYPD needed to educate the public more about their successes.

“We have to let the public know that it’s not always the police’s fault,” he said.

Meanwhile, Harry Malinkoff, of Hell’s Kitchen, asked in relation to the prostitution problem, “If these [prostitutes] were across the street from Gracie Mansion, would they still be there?”

Afterward, constituents swarmed toward Quinn and her staff, while the young men from Fulton Houses hoped to talk more to the police representatives. Miguel Acevedo, who had brought the young men to the forum, said that 20 to 30 young men have come to him.

“The fear is still inside these kids. They’re scared,” he said, adding that a few “cowboy cops” are known for “throwing kids against the wall …. The kids come to me, and I try to mediate, use my connections with the police chiefs, before some young idiot decides he’s been ‘disrespected’ too many times.”

He brought the young men to the Y, he added, because “I don’t want to lose any of my kids to a police shooting — like what happened to Sean Bell.”