Pubdate: Sun, 21 Aug 2005 Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (PA) Copyright: 2005 PG Publishing Contact: http://www.post-gazette.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/341 Author: Ann Belser Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/pot.htm (Cannabis) Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/coke.htm (Cocaine) Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/youth.htm (Youth) Note: Fighting the Grind: A special photo journal accompanies this article; available for viewing at http://www.post-gazette.com/journal/photos_bygallery.asp?special=Fighting+the+Grind ANXIETY OVER CRIME, SOCIAL PROBLEMS, WEARS DOWN MCKEESPORT When Alycia Washington walks out of her apartment, she doesn't look at or talk to anyone who lives in her building in downtown McKeesport. It's the only way she knows to keep out of trouble. The police cruise by Midtown Towers often. One night this month when Alycia, 15, was asleep inside, police Lt. Glenn Lynn was down the block hollering at two men to get moving while they were arguing about smoking drugs. Nearby, police arrested a woman on an outstanding warrant. Down Fifth Avenue, still in Alycia's neighborhood, they poured out the alcohol that a man was drinking in a park and ground a small amount of suspected marijuana into the ground so it was unusable. In July, Alycia heard shooting behind her building. It was about 6 p.m. and her mother called her away from the window. In junior high school, Alycia was an A student. Her first year of high school ended without honors. She said she was overwhelmed by the size of the high school and her course load was too difficult for her. It's not so much the high-profile crimes, those that draw the television cameras and are splashed across the news, that erode the quality of life in areas like McKeesport. It's the day-to-day hassles of gangs of young people in the street, punctuated with shots that may hit no one, that grind the residents down. This year has been a busy one for the department. In just the first two months of this summer, McKeesport police answered 5,725 calls and made 596 arrests. During the first seven months of this year, the 60-member department answered 18,333 calls, which is already 4,738 more than all of the calls answered last year. McKeesport is not among the highest crime communities in Pennsylvania; it is among a group of towns and neighborhoods that have persistent levels of both nonviolent and violent crime. Malia Jenkins, 12, remembers seeing the man with a red bandanna on his head reaching into his waistband, pulling out a gun and firing it. Her sister, Kimiko, 14, said time seemed to go in slow motion as she and her sister started running, first toward their apartment, which was also toward the gunfire, and then away and into a stranger's apartment after a woman there called for them to get out of the line of fire. Dawn Jenkins, 41, still shudders when she describes the panic when she could not immediately find her daughters. No one was hurt. State police have been joining McKeesport officers recently to conduct what they call Weed and Seed patrols. Weed and Seed is a federally funded program to target drugs and violent crimes and provide other money for social services and drug prevention programs. The police are the front line in the "weeding" portion of the program, and Lt. Glenn Lynn leads those patrols. Lynn, 43, who rides with State Police Cpl. Greg Keefer, has been patrolling the streets of McKeesport for 14 years. He knows the prostitutes by name, and they know him just as well. "Get home," he tells one on a recent night. She yells back at him that he should drive with his elbow in the car. Driving around the city with his car windows down, Lynn listens to the sounds of the neighborhoods. Some yelling down one street just before 10 p.m. causes him to turn left off Jenny Lind Street and head toward Locust Street. The noise was a mother calling to her young children. The temperature was still in the 80s after 9 p.m., and children were walking and biking all over the lower-income neighborhoods of McKeesport, where air conditioning is in short supply. Even children as young as toddlers were walking along the sidewalks, holding onto their parents' hands. Behind an apartment building, Officer Mark Marino finds a film canister with a plastic sandwich bag that is wrapping a white powder. "You want to see something?" Marino asks Lynn as he walks up to the car. Lynn pulls out the bag that fills about half the canister. Later, testing shows it is 8 grams of powdered cocaine. He said it could sell for $500 to $800. On that night, it's destroyed, and no one is arrested because Marino didn't see who tossed it away. Another call for a drunken driver turns up a handgun in the driver's back pocket. The police hold it while the man is put into a police car. Later, he will be checked for a carry permit. "Recently we were taking guns off of 14-year-old kids," Lynn says. "They'll tell you they're running with the gang out of Crawford Village." Mayor Jim Brewster does his own patrols, driving around nearly every night, checking neighborhoods and reminding young people that the city has a 10 p.m. curfew. On a recent night, he parks in a lot on Fairview Avenue and shines his headlights at five men, some of whom are leaning against a railing in the late hours of the night. Brewster identifies them as drug dealers and, as the headlights shine, the gathering slowly breaks up, with each man walking away in a different direction. Later that night, the men are all back where they once were. "I think when people see darkness or see weeds or see bad buildings," Brewster says, "it psychologically tells them 'it doesn't matter if I throw this cup out.' " Sumac Street is spotted with abandoned homes. Darrian Montgomery, 39, has two children living in his house, his 10-year-old son and his girlfriend's 12-year-old daughter. Montgomery coaches for the Little Tigers football league, which is for younger children. He says, as many residents have said, that there should be more programs in the afternoon and evenings for the youths aged 10 to 21, who are in the prime ages for getting into trouble. Montgomery said kids from "down the hill" -- the code for Crawford Village - -- come to his McKeesport neighborhood with their drugs. "This summer it's been ridiculous, the crowds of kids yelling, screaming and cussing," he says. In Haler Heights, a higher-income neighborhood across the city, the residents who are making a "flashlight walk" on "National Night Out" say the instruments of petty crime that disrupt their neighborhood include a firecracker that blew up firefighter Jeff List's mailbox on the Fourth of July and a round table rolled down Marshall Drive, denting a neighbor's car. There are no children on the street late at night in Haler Heights, where many of the homes have air-conditioning compressors along the side. Police have stepped up patrols. After weeks of arresting people for underage drinking and drugs at bars around the city every Friday night, things are quieter by early August. Police raid houses of suspected drug dealers. They hit the same areas over and over until residents, such as Arla Payne, 46, of Bailey Avenue, complain they are too aggressive on her block. Payne's son is currently incarcerated on a drug charge; she says she's glad he isn't in the neighborhood to be hassled by the police. Police Chief Joseph Pero thinks the stepped-up patrols are helping the city. Last year, he says, there were nine homicides. This year there has been one, and it was in a domestic dispute. "We've been working with a lot of outside agencies, and it's starting to pay off," he says. Dawn Jenkins, the mother of the two girls caught in the crossfire several years ago, moved out of Crawford Village after the incident to try to get away from the worst of the noise and danger. Though only a block away in a post-World War II brick house, life is quieter. Her daughters spend summer days with their friends, riding bicycles to Renziehausen Park, where they've recently discovered the goldfish in the newly renovated pond. For Mayor Brewster, that goldfish pond is a symbol of where McKeesport once was and where it can be again. The pond was built in 1939 as a Works Progress Administration project. Brewster remembers watching the fish swim when he was a boy. But the pond, and the fountain up the hill that feeds the pond and recirculates the water, fell into disrepair. It closed 43 years ago. This year, although the water is murky and the goldfish are still small, there is something to watch in the pond again for the first time in four decades. He is trying to bring the city up. There are 300 buildings slated for demolition mostly in the poor neighborhoods. The middle-class areas are getting their worst streets paved. Brewster says the abandoned buildings could be taken as a sign of McKeesport's successes. The children of the people who lived there have gone to college after their parents worked in the mills to send them. They have moved out, are raising their families elsewhere, and have no inclination to worry about a house in McKeesport. "I can't turn McKeesport into something it's not," he said. "McKeesport is a blue-collar, hardworking community. That's what it's known for. That's what it will always be." Dolores Washington, Alycia's mother, said she worries about her daughter every day, "especially if she's traveling alone." Alycia, who is a member of Brewster's youth advisory committee, is banking on the mayor to be able to clean up the community. This fall she wants to do better in school, earning A's in memory of her father, who died in June. For the school year, she plans to go from her apartment to the school bus stop a block away without engaging anyone. If she doesn't bother them, she says, maybe they won't bother her, either. - --- MAP posted-by: Beth