Councilmember Brad Lander came to speak at the ANA meeting last night. He was hit with a foul ball and then popped one.
Two distraught neighbors grabbed his, and the meeting's, attention complaining how the 66 Precinct mishandled a fight Monday night, June 20, among local and visiting teenagers at Albemarle Road and McDonald Avenue. The officers were insulting and refused to take a report, they each said out of the other’s hearing. Both women told police they saw a gun and an injured teenager.
“Everyone who calls the police needs to be treated respectfully,” Councilman Lander said as the audience murmured its approval. He promised to call Deputy Inspector John Sprague, the 66 Precinct commander, a man he termed "collaborative with the community.”
Neighbors say the area around PS 230 has become a hot spot. Repeated assaults and robberies at the PS 230 playground have made kids and parents leery of going there. Lander said he would encourage D.I. Sprague to increase police presence at the playground to “calm things down.” He left the broader issue of the area’s security to the Albemarle Neighborhood Association to handle, that being its claim to fame, going back to the 70s.
The fight among 4 neighborhood teenagers and a group of about 8 teen-aged boys from outside Kensington started on Albemarle Road off McDonald Avenue, outside the Albemarle Food Center , a deli at 101 McDonald, and then spread east along Albemarle toward E 3. The local kids were inside the deli “almost hiding” to avoid a fight with the marauders.
Veronica Guzman, the volunteer coordinator for Brad Lander’s Teen Chef program and a community activist dedicated to PS 230's PTA, burst into sobs as she described how disrespectful the police had been to her. She said she and a friend came upon the fight as they went to buy iced coffee at the deli. One young man, his faced hidden by a bandana, had what looked like the cartridge barrel of a pistol inside his black backpack; others had baseball bats and sticks, she said.
The kids went chasing the local boys down Albemarle. Sonia, a neighbor who works in a NYPD precinct and saw the fight unfold from in front of her house at Albemarle and E 2, told the meeting, “Someone was injured. ”There was an ambulance there. . .Broken glass. I thought it was a riot.”
Once Veronica began yelling about a kid with a gun, about 10-15 neighbors popped out on the street to help her. Around 8 p.m. three people called 911: Veronica, her friend, and the owner of Am-Thai Chili Basil. The cops, about 8 of them from the 66 Precinct, didn’t show up for another 20 minutes.
Veronica said, “Police treated me like a piece of dirt.” One cop called her “a crazy psycho lady,” and threatened to arrest her, until her husband stepped in. The cop encouraged him to take Veronica home to calm down. Another cop brought up NYC budget cuts as the reason he wouldn’t make a report. A third officer, the only woman there, said, “We’re here. Isn’t that good enough?”
No, the deli owners said, they didn’t call the cops. They didn’t see a thing since they were inside making sandwiches when it all began “outside their store,” but they could hear Veronica warning about the gun. Later, when it was all over (around 9:30 p.m., according to Veronica), a police officer told them he ‘d found a plastic knife on one of the kids.
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