Tonight over fifty residents from the neighborhood surrounding Franklin & Marshall College (F&M) met at the school’s Barshinger Building to discuss a recent crime increase in the area bounded by Race Ave, President Ave, Harrisburg Pk, and Buchanan Ave. Local police officials attended the meeting, as well as Mayor Rick Gray, F&M President John Fry, and Lisa Riggs of the James Street Improvement District (JSID).
The gathering was hosted by neighborhood resident John Walker. Walker opened the meeting by describing how, last month, his wife and daughter witnessed the brutal mugging of a neighbor around 8:30 in the evening. This was a wake-up call for Walker: “This assault changed my perspective. This happened in my yard, this endangered my family. This seriously injured my neighbor.”
When the floor was opened up for public discussion, many echoed the sentiment that neighborhood crime has worsened in recent years. According to one 30-year resident, “in the last five years, the crime has gone up quite a lot. It was [once] an extremely quiet neighborhood. The most you got was some noise from F&M at graduation.”
One man who had lived on President Ave since 1979 described the downward trend: “It was always light property crime. But [now] you’ve got people that are hunting,…driving around, carrying a gun, stalking a neighborhood….We’ve got heavier players now, and they’re armed.”
Many of these concerned residents expressed a growing hesitance to venture out in the neighborhood at all after dark.
Police representatives offered the neighbors a strong rule of thumb: When in doubt, call the cops. According to one officer, a common reason for not reporting suspicious behavior is that assumption that someone else has already done so. But this logic is irrelevant, the officer explained, because multiple calls can assist law enforcement in determining the urgency of a report.
Dovetailing with this advice, JSID Executive Director Lisa Riggs recommended that residents strengthen personal connections beyond the limits of their block: “The more the better….People know their neighborhoods better than we’re ever going to know them—better than the bike squad, the patrol cars, the F&M public safety. You live there: You walk in, you walk out, you know what feels right.”
Near the end of the meeting Mayor Rick Gray urged the residents to avoid living in fear. He asked for a show of hands from those who attended the last First Friday; most were raised. He then asked how many of them were concerned for their safety; no hands were raised. Gray concluded on this note, suggesting that the best cure for neighborhood crime is a neighborhood bustling with confident pedestrian activity.
At the end of the meeting, Walker encouraged those in attendance to sign up for a neighborhood e-mail list, remembering that this meeting was merely the start of a strong neighborhood alliance that will continue to grow in the months ahead.
