New Haven Independent

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Dusk descends along with a sense of menace in the heart of the Dwight neighborhood. It’s showtime. Dozens of kids on bikes, some barely 10 years old, others approaching adulthood, swarm onto Edgewood Avenue. Some ride with traffic, some against it. Some ride on the sidewalks. Most of them are boys; the girls hang out on front porches, talking about the shootings they’ve witnessed this summer or complaining about the cops. The cops, too, make their presence known on the twilight Edgewood stage. There’s a walking cop. Two officers patrol in cars, turning on their flashers when too many kids on bikes congregate on a block, racing down the street at the sound of screeching tires or any sign of trouble.

Greg Smith has a part in this nightly scene, too. He walks up and down the block. He talks with the kids. He talks with the cops. He talks with parents, too—when he finds some.

That’s his mission: Finding the parents. Smith is a 44-year-old engineer in the neighborhood and the father of a 14-year-old who got jumped on the block a few nights earlier. In the face of an explosion of violence this summer committed by kids on bikes, cops have cracked down on kids who ride on sidewalks or against traffic. (See “Lt. Hassett’s Rules of the Road” as well as the New Haven Register’s overview of the problem.) Brown decided that the root of the problem lies with parents. He started a nightly patrol between the 8-to-9 o’clock show hour along the stretch of Edgewood between Day and Kensington streets. He invites other parents to accompany him.

Tonight, Donny Elder and Carlton Edwards have joined him. So has Dwight Alderwoman Joyce Chen. Chen regularly enlists Smith’s help in finding jobs or other help for troubled young males in the neighborhood; most recently he found an assembly-line job for a homeless neighbor who’d been in and out of prison.

“It’s kind of difficult finding parents willing to do this,” Smith says, setting out on patrol dressed in the pleated slacks and blue dress shirt he wears to his engineering job at Honeywell in North Haven. “We need to rally some of the parents so they can know what their children are doing and what their children aren’t doing. Someone had to start. Why not me?”

“Hi, Mr. Greg,” calls out a teen-aged boy hanging on a corner with some friends on bikes.

“How you doin’, man?” Smith responds, then meets up with two cops, Sgt. Anthony Gugliemo and Office Dave Coppola. Coppola has a bike, too, the nicest on the block tonight: a Cannondale. Unlike the other riders, he wears a helmet.

Coppola is tense and frustrated as he watches the knots of up to a dozen teens appearing at various spots within a block radius. Last night he and other officers chased 60 kids who were riding in a pack, causing trouble. Another bicycling group had a shoot-out.

“There’s got to be a way to keep them busy,” Coppola says. “They’re begging for something to do. I can only tell them what they can’t do.”

That can cause more problems than it solves, insists 18-year-old Jazmin Jackson as she hangs out on an Edgewood Avenue front porch with her friends.

Jackson acknowledges that the boys on bikes do cause trouble. “I was in the last shootout. Me and my home girl were hanging out on Day and Chapel,” she says. “All of a sudden, bikes are a trend. There will be 30 kids from one hood and 30 kids on bikes from another hood. They meet up and start shooting. Kids are getting shot younger and younger, anywhere from 12 and 16 years old.

“But it cracks me up. The cops want to crack down on bikes. It’s about the crimes they commit on the bikes. Giving that 9-year-old boy a ticket for riding on a sidewalk—that just gets the parents mad.” The police should work with the parents instead, Jackson argues.

It’s not so easy to locate the parents, Greg Smith says. He finds a mom, named Wanda, on a porch with her kids. The reason they don’t usually see Wanda around, the patrollers learn, is that Wanda usually goes to school from 5 to 10 p.m. Wanda stayed home tonight because neighborhood kids jumped her daughter the other day. She didn’t feel safe leaving the kids home alone.

The patrollers know that Wanda has had an ongoing argument with another mom in the neighborhood over their daughters’ fighting. On the spot, they organize a meeting for this coming Sunday with the two moms and other neighborhood parents, to try to mediate.

As if by a director’s cue, the crowds thin out at 9 p.m. Before going home, Smith and his fellow patrollers discuss putting together an after-school program for the kids this fall. Alderwoman Chen names other parents in the neighborhood who have expressed interest in getting involved in helping kids.

“There’s a park here. Unfortunately, there’s no lights,” Smith says, pointing behind Dwight School. He gestures to the new community center built at the school. It’s closed most of the time. “If we can keep these kids active, a lot of this can be prevented,” he says.

Whatever the prospects of the group’s long-range plans, Smith and company have accomplished something tangible tonight. Both the kids and the cops were on their best behavior.

Want to help? Contact Greg Smith at 887-3277.

A related story on a woman making a difference in her neighborhood: “Because of Connie.”