Recently, residents in the Clearview Civic Association and several outside it made calls to the 109th Precinct. The complaint was about a house near the corner of 26th Avenue and 207th Street blasting music.
This music blasted most of the day and did not end till 10 minutes after midnight. No officer arrived. The the precinct told one caller there are people with guns out there, so when the police can get around to the problem, they will. This is a standard answer from the 109th. It only rushes to the Bay Terrace shopping area or the Flushing business district.
This was proven about a year ago, when one early evening several civic residents were outside their houses, heard a strange popping sound and found that the car that just drove down the street had shot out several car windows. It took hours for the police to arrive from the 109th. The officer told the victims they have insurance. This response caused the victims to make more calls and the 109th sent out its community affairs officer, who called the other officer and told him to make a proper report and told the victims he was sorry for how this was handled.
For the night officer on duty Aug. 8, this was an incident with a gun. There was no hurry on this call because it was not in Flushing or the shopping center, so there was no way we would get any response for disturbing the peace calls.
About three weeks ago, one of our members called the 109th because children in a car were smoking pot. He was surprised when a car from the 109th arrived — more surprising, the officer told him to stay in his house while he told the kids they should find someplace else to smoke, where no one will call the police. The officer did not arrest the kids because he told our member they smoked all the pot.
These are only a few reasons for the failure of the 109th to respond. It does not care about any areas other than the two I mentioned above. The commander of the 109th cannot properly divide the manpower. The officers of the 109th need retraining. We need all the personnel at the precinct changed to officers who will police the entire precinct, not just two areas. Finally, the 109th is grossly undermanned and can only handle one call a night.
This means Mayor Michael Bloomberg and NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly are out of touch with problems outside Manhattan and are not responding to their commanders’ calls for more men and vehicles. They could claim nothing can be done at this time because of the financial problems, but where are they spending all the money from Washington I read about?
We need a new precinct for Bayside and Whitestone so we can get a police response when needed. We need officers who know the neighborhood and their neighbors.
John Geiyer
Acting President
Clearview Civic Association
Bayside
