Lights, Camera … Deterrence?

Three blue light telephones are on order by the police department and will soon be installed at darkened Fair Haven intersections where nighttime trouble often occurs.

Add some bright new fixtures leased from the electric company by a new, community-minded business down by the river.

Toss in more surveillance cameras, and re-positioning older ones, and the result: Fewer bad behaviors in public places.

Translation: less crime.

That electric recipe for continuing the lowering of the crime stats in the right direction in Fair Haven emerged at the most recent neighborhood community management team meeting held at the Blatchley Avenue police substation.

District Manager Lt. David Zannelli announced to a pleased group of 35 residents that funding has been secured, the order put in, and locations finalized for three blue light emergency response telephones.

They’re the kind you see in profusion around the Yale University campus. They offer not only light but direct access to police emergency services and are widely seen as a deterrent to crime. These will be the first installed in Fair Haven.

The three devices, paid for half by the NHPD and half by funds voted for that purpose from Fair Haven’s piece of the annual $10,000 Livable City Initiative (LCI)-administered grants given to each city management district, are to be installed in the coming months.

After scouting devices and locations, Zannelli has decided that these first three will be installed at Grand and Blatchley; on the triangle at Ferry and Chapel; and at Chatham Square Park on the northeast corner facing Lombard.

He said he is grateful for the support of the police chiefs and hopes to order up more lights, funding permitting. ​“My goal is to have areas in Fair Haven as bright as they are on Yale’s campus or on Ashmun Street,” he said referring to the brightly-lit streets in Dixwell’s Monterey Place housing development.

LCI Specialist Laurie Lopez-Anastasio reported that some of the area’s bright ​“light the night” security floodlights have been repositioned, at Zannelli’s request.

These floodlights, which used to be purchased or leased from United Illuminating, turn night into day beneath where they are targeted. The idea is that bad behaviors disappear, or move somewhere else.

Zannelli said that ongoing loitering and other problems, like open drug dealing at the Blatchley and Clay intersection, particularly near Lou’s Lodge, have prompted him, among other measures, to try to get the area brightly lit. Lopez-Anastasio reported she was able to move one of the bright lights from the middle of Maltby Place so that it now is illuminating the streets, corners, and doorways of the Blatchley and Clay intersection.

Between that and a standing no-tresspass order, which he recently obtained from Lou’s Lodge, Zannelli hopes that the intersection will cease being the trouble spot it has recently been.

Both he and Lopez-Anastasio are passionate believers in the power of light. In her 16th year with LCI, Lopez-ANastasio firmly believes that people are ​“less apt to do bad things if it’s bright.”

She reported that she recently preached that chapter and verse to Patriot Marine, the new maritime construction business poised to renovate the building down at very-dark-by-night and isolated 90 River Street .

Result: the owners have been in touch with Eversource, and three floodlight fixtures are now in place. ​“Half the battle [to maintain security] is it’s so dark,” she said.

Zannelli says that on his wish list, once again funding permitting, are also new surveillance cameras, with directions he can reposition without a lot of trouble, like from his cell phone.

But that’s in the future.

Crime in Fair Haven, like most of the city is way down, Zannelli said. He attributed it to good officers vigorously doing the job, but also to a plan, of which lights and cameras are definitely a part.

“I’d like to make it [Fair Haven] like a college,” he said.