Despite recent stabbing, crime down in Harlem

In the first week of January, nine-year-old Anthony Maldonado was fatally stabbed by his 25-year-old cousin at the General Grant Houses.

This news broke just a few weeks after the New York Police Department announced a record-low murder rate for 2009—with the fewest homicides in a 12-month period since the current tracking system was created in 1963.

With murder and overall crime rates declining significantly throughout Morningside Heights and West Harlem, as well as the rest of the city, the murder at the public housing complex on Amsterdam, just north of 123rd Street, reminded residents that serious crimes still occur, despite changing trends.

The changes within the Police Department’s 26th Precinct, which encompasses the Columbia campus and much of West Harlem, are equally dramatic as citywide declines. CompStat, which the Police Department uses to track crime citywide, reports that in 1990, 15 murders occurred within the 26th Precinct. Last year, there were only two. And while 339 robberies took place in this region in 1998, only 197 were reported within the precinct in 2009.

Other comparable neighborhoods have also shown dramatic decreases, with Washington Heights jumping from 103 murders in 1990 to only 2 in 2009, and the South Bronx decreased from 72 murders in 1990 to 14 last year.

Jeffrey Fagan, co-director of Columbia’s Center on Crime, Community, and Law, said that these trends reflect nationwide changes.

“The homicide rates have been going down for a long time. It is a broad historical ... decline across the board in cities as diverse as Milwaukee to, say, St Louis,” he said, adding, that the major decline in Harlem and New York dates back 15 years.

At Grant Houses though, some of the recent crimes—two instances of animal abuse and a major drug bust, along with the murder—have raised some questions about the historical trends.

“There’s crime on every street, every corner,” Robert Exorphe, a resident at Grant Houses, said. “People have been shot a lot. People do get stabbed, and people do drugs. I do see it, the police see it, what’s going on every day.”

But James Harper, the community affairs officer at the 26th precinct, explained that the recent Grant Houses incidents are fairly common and do not suggest that crime is on the rise.

“To me, these incidents do not seem unusual,” Harper said. “Crime is down overall, but this kind of thing is not unusual for this type of neighborhood. Stabbings are not uncommon at all. They happen all year round, especially in a place like the Grant Houses. Generally people are happy with the situation, though.”

Fagan agreed that the recent crimes are not statistically meaningful. “Things spike ... Very rarely is anything flat. If it spikes up and stays up, then I’d be worried,” Fagan said.

Sarah Martin, president of the Grant Houses Residents Association, explained that the January murder is not indicative of the general nature of crime at Grant Houses.

‘It was an isolated issue,” Martin, resident for 50 years, said, adding, “I think that our biggest crime here is drug-related. There are many people out there that are jobless and for other reasons are trying to make a dollar.” And in January, 11 people were in fact indicted for selling cocaine in and around the housing complex.

For many residents living at the Grant Houses, these isolated crimes in the first month of the decade are not cause for alarm.

“I’ve been here 52 years and I’ve never had a problem because everybody here knows me,” Rose Rodriguez, a Grant Houses resident, said.

For some local officials there remains much room for improvement in public safety, despite larger declines in crime.

“We can’t get comfortable,” Reverend Georgiette Morgan-Thomas, Community Board 9 chair for health and environment issues, said. “It’s an ongoing task that we have to be vigilant about,” she said.

But City Councilman Robert Jackson, a Democrat who represents parts of Harlem and Morningside Heights, said that better communication between the NYPD and residents has helped reduce crime.

“When you build a relationship between community and police, when police know about what’s going on in a certain area, people are able to communicate directly,” Jackson said. “That helps to keep the neighborhood safe. We should be positive about what’s happened here.”

“There really has been a gallant effort on the part of police,” Morgan-Thomas said. Jackson added, “As a member of the city council, the most important thing is the safety of the people I represent.”

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