By Sarina Trangle
City parks employees had to flag down an ambulance this August when Joseph Sharp, a seasonal worker, toiling on the Kissena Park tennis courts suffered a heart attack, NYC Parks Advocates said.
Geoffrey Croft, president of the group, said because the Police and Fire Department dispatchers do not have a system of mapping out parks’ terrain, paramedics struggled to reach Sharp, who ultimately died.
“Two ambulances were dispatched because they couldn’t find him,” Croft said. “There is no way you can describe where you are inside a park… with public safety, EMS, and Fire. We have no way of judging how much crime is happening and where and how to allocate resources.”
The FDNY confirmed it received a call Aug. 13 at 10:21 a.m., a second at 10:29 a.m. due to the victim’s updated condition and that the first of two ambulances arrived at 10:35 a.m., eventually transporting the patient to the hospital by 10:46 a.m.
For years, advocates have pushed the city to improve police response to crime in parks by developing a system of tracking where specifically in parks the incidents occur, rather than assigning green spaces one address, and to regularly publish statistics.
The momentum led the city to pass legislation requiring the Police Department to track major felony crime complaints in parks an acre in size or larger in 2005, but compliance fell short, with the NYPD saying it lacked the necessary technology. A second bill was signed into law this February, issuing a timetable for collecting such crime data for all recreation facilities, playgrounds and parks by 2018.
But its early implementation stages — tracking major felony complaints in the city’s 100 largest parks by this past June — have come and passed.
The mayor’s office and NYPD said police are revamping its computer system to comply with all provisions of the law as quickly as possible rather than dealing with one component at a time.
“Public safety is a top priority for this administration, and we’re committed to making sure New Yorkers are soon provided these important crime stats on their neighborhood parks,” the mayor’s spokesman Phil Walzak said in a statement.
The NYPD’s most recent park crime statistics cover major felony complaints in 31 parks during the second quarter of 2014.
Flushing Meadows Corona Park had the second most reported crimes — 27 — after Central Park. Fifteen of these were grand larcenies, six grand larcenies of automobiles, four felony assaults and two robberies.
The NYPD also reported a grand larceny in Alley Pond Park and one in Kissena Park and two robberies in Forest Park.
Frederick Kress, president of the Queens Coalition for Parks and Green Space and a member of the Flushing Meadows Corona Park Conservancy Board of Directors, said the NYPD’s park data tactics does not encourage victims of crimes in green spaces to report them and warned such an attitude can have dire consequences.
“People go to parks to have a safe place for recreation,” he said. “There was mass crime in the ‘80s and that scared a lot of people away from parks… they were off limits.”
Like many larger parks, Forest Park appears to have a higher crime rate and it concerned many when a string of sexual assaults and rapes were reported there last year.
But Ed Wendell, a Woodhaven Residents’ Block Association director, said small parks need attention, too. He said a few months ago parents complained of men smoking marijuana and drinking in Equity Playground, which police quickly halted.
“Those parks to me are even more important because they attract so many people, particularly children,” Wendell said.
Reach reporter Sarina Trangle at 718-260-4546 or by e-mail at strangle@cnglocal.com.
