Thursday, May 10, 2007

the crapshooters

Last night at 3 am there were seven gang guys under my window making noise & playing craps with their drug money. They toss the dice on the sidewalk & snap their fingers as the bones roll. They were standing in front of the door to a ground floor apartment & sitting on cars they don't own. I wanted to pour boiling oil on them. It's been two years since these punks have hung out here after the bars closed. I didn't want them to come back, so after awhile I called the police. I asked the officer at the desk to send a patrol car around & chase them away. "Do they have drugs?" he asked, as if that was important. "I don't know," I said. "That doesn't matter. It's three in the morning, they're a public nuisance, we have children in the building. " He said he would, in an unconvincing tone of voice. The cops may or may not have come, but the creeps wandered off on their own shortly after I made the call. It takes so little effort to keep the corner clear of the sociopaths, a cop car driving through the intersection a couple of times between midnight & three. When they do regularly, & there's unsavory people gathered, they stop & use the bullhorn on the car roof to disperse them, the people wander off , & they walk away from the area, not into the local buildings, & they tend to stay away for weeks. So what does that tell me? Yeah, they're like roaches, chase them away here & they congregate elsewhere. But one block in one direction is a liquor store & a bar & dirty laundromat, & there's open drug dealing. One block in the other direction is like another town, never anyone hanging out. So this corner is in the middle, we catch some of the garbage. But if the cops get the idea it's not worth policing, then the crap shooters will be here all the time, right under the streetlights, not giving a shit because nobody else does.

Labels:


Comments:
The city should follow the example of other communities and restrict the hours of operation of certain businesses that attract these sort of miscreants late at night. Fast food joints, laundromats and bodegas are okay to be open at 3 a.m. in Manhattan, but not in a residential area of Elizabeth.
 
That's not really the cause. Bars close at 2 or 3 as in surrounding towns, & they don't hang out at the local 7/11 or Dunkin Donuts a few blocks away. They're just gang guys who feel at liberty to play craps on a well-lit street corner at 3 am because the odds are the police won't drive past.
 
Post a Comment

<< Home
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?