New Haven Independent

Tuesday 10:26 p.m.

Today is the big day for High Point’s East Central neighborhood — Chief Fealy confidently says that the drug market there is closed “8 AM, Wednesday, August 15,” and the reason is what happened tonight.

We just finished observing the “Call In” this evening, and it was pretty powerful. Before that, we spent the day learning as much as we could soak up about High Point, their PD and this initiative.

East Central and the three neighborhoods that were the focus of this initiative in the past four years are all adjacent to downtown (which is alive for two months with the furniture shows but is otherwise very, very quiet) and sadly typical of places around the country with the same problem. They are predominantly African-American, but the drug dealing that is the big problem doesn’t service the local population — it is the open-air dealing that services folks from all over the area, often white, as just one more noxious use inflicted on poor neighborhoods. The four neighborhoods together have 6,000 to 8,000 people, so are much smaller in numbers than typical New Haven neighborhoods even though the geographical boundaries are similar.

Asst.Chief (Major) Marty Sumner was our tour guide for most of the day. Under Chief Fealy, this initiative is really Marty’s baby and he took great pride in showing off the three areas that have already benefited. Fealy had talked about how as a new officer in Austin, Texas, he prided himself on knowing his beat — every troublemaker, every pothole — only to realize later how much he didn’t know — all the good people trying to live normal lives and keep good homes. Well, you could tell Marty knows his areas in both senses. Officers are obviously hyper-sensitive to signs of crime and decay, but he pointed to houses on almost every block that were lovingly maintained and spoke about, for instance, the older lady who comes to his office regularly to either scold or praise him for how his officers are doing.

You hear police officers talk about how they see people at the worst points in their lives when they are either doing something awful or just had something awful done to them. In many ways, that has informed tradition police perceptions about the world — the “thin blue line” protecting society from itself. In order to harness the community as a positive agent and reform the behavior of people who are breaking the law, it takes a whole lot of faith in humanity to set aside the daily knowledge about the evil that people are capable of, and the anger and frustration that crime victims have at both the perpetrators who need to be engaged and the police themselves. It’s great to see people like Fealy, Sumner and the others down here have that faith and put it to work.

We’re waking up at 5 AM to catch our plane back, so we’ll continue our posts tomorrow.

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