By Maya Rao
The Philadelphia Inquirer
Related: Patrol psychology 101
BURLINGTON CITY, N.J. — Two men in small, crime-plagued Burlington City - one young, one old, separated by two blocks — recently offered sharply different views of an increase in police presence and arrests here.
One considers himself a victim. One sees himself as a beneficiary.
One is Robert Bryant, 28, who was on his way to play basketball in the city’s New Yorkshire neighborhood two Thursdays ago when a police car pulled up at the curb, two officers got out, and one yelled, “Yo!”
In the sunlit evening on a well-traveled street, they loosed a series of questions, Bryant said. Why was he wearing a big coat? Did he have any weapons? Did he know anything about the recent murder of a gas station attendant in Westampton? The officers patted Bryant down before they let him go.
“You sneeze wrong, and you’re going to jail around here,” Bryant said afterward to a reporter who witnessed the incident.
Around the corner lives Charles Moss, 61, a retiree who has been enjoying the calmer neighborhood. He praised police for the increase he observed in the number of people stopped on streets. Liquor bottles and trash were no longer being dumped in his yard. Fewer bands of young men were huddling on his section of York Street.
Before this year, he said, he saw police officers just sitting around. “They wouldn’t do diddly.”
A county grant that the acting police chief said adds up to a dozen police officers from other municipalities each week to Burlington City’s 36-member full-time force already has altered the streets this year. Police made 877 arrests in the first three months of this year, up 24 percent from the same period last year, according to data supplied by the department.
Even without the special police, the city has roughly the same number of full-time police officers as Delran and Cinnaminson, whose populations are about 50 percent greater. It added four more police officers in 2007 and also relies on 22 part-time employees.
Residents are split over the new law enforcement effort in a city long riven by drugs and violence. Some say they feel safer. Others say officers are harassing people but hardly tackling real crime.
Councilwoman Suzanne Woodard lives in the New Yorkshire neighborhood, which accounts for much of the city’s crime. She said the increased presence shows people that crime will not be tolerated. But residents tell her it is a double-edged sword.
Longtime residents want protection against a transient population that causes much of the crime, Woodward said. Yet some tell her they fear racial motivations in the behavior of a nearly all-white police force in a city that is one-quarter African American.
“Some people say to me that the police are acting like every black person is a crack addict, but I have people that live in the neighborhood that say thank God they came,” said Woodard, who is African American.
Police responded to 27,000 calls last year, acting Police Chief Anthony Wallace said.
In September, a shooting killed one man and wounded another six months after a 21-year-old had been stabbed to death in another part of the city. In December 2006, a Trenton man was killed and two juveniles were injured in a shooting.
Burlington City covers 3.7 square miles and has 10,000 residents. It had 55 violent crimes in 2006, the same number as comparably sized Mount Holly in the county and behind only Willingboro and Pemberton, which are much larger, according to the most recent state crime data.
Burlington City is one of 27 county municipalities participating in the agreement to share police officers, called the Burlington County Law Enforcement Task Force.
Now, “the guns aren’t going off as much as they used to,” resident Tom Bielucke said. “A year and a half ago, you heard guns going off all the time, boom-boom-boom.”
Bryant, who is African American, said police had stopped him on the streets randomly several times this year. Bryant was released from jail in August 2006 after serving time for distributing drugs. City police charged him with obstructing administration of law two months later.
Wallace said the department must have probable cause to stop someone and had abided by an internal affairs process, though he said he was unsure why Bryant had been questioned.
“We don’t violate anyone’s rights,” he said.
City spokesman John Alexander said some people may have trust issues that would lead them to believe they were being unfairly targeted, but “we certainly have no policy of profiling people.”
The department has been working on community policing and building relationships with residents - starting when they are young — so officers become more familiar faces, Wallace said.
A group of middle-age men who congregate regularly on James Denson’s front porch in the New Yorkshire neighborhood to drink, smoke and joke around, said the police cars a reporter saw driving through every few minutes were too intrusive. Those officers, they said, seemed to take issue with them socializing outside, though they never left the porch.
“The old cops wouldn’t even bother,” said Roy McBride, who must appear in court soon on an open-container charge of which he says he is not guilty. But now, “it’s ridiculous. You can’t even walk down the street [without] wondering if they’re going to stop and harass you.”
Many people welcome the crackdown.
“I can’t blame them,” longtime resident Hattie Edmonds said. If people who are stopped have done nothing wrong, “then they’ll let them go.”
Mayor Jim Fazzone, who took office in January, has proposed installing a dozen street-surveillance cameras to prevent crime and assist in investigations. The technology, which the Prosecutor’s Office has said is not used anywhere else in the county, is used in large cities including Philadelphia, and the administration wants to find grants to cover the $250,000 to buy the cameras.
The proposal would need approval from City Council, where some members question the roughly $100,000 it would cost annually to operate the system. The administration is also organizing a steering committee to apply for a grant for a community-based crime-reduction strategy. Fazzone said his administration wants to attack the problem in more ways than a police presence - through having better recreational opportunities, for example, and bulldozing abandoned buildings.
For now, the calmer streets have made people optimistic but cautious.
“We won’t know until another month, when it gets warmer,” Moss said. “Once it gets warmer, that’s when all the action starts.”
Copyright 2008 The Philadelphia Inquirer