By: Anthony Rifilato
Then there's another picture.
For some, paranoia runs deep here. Some residents said that this neighborhood is becoming an incubator for gangs.
I'm driving onto Pine Street, past the Corner Store on Seaman Avenue, past its brick wall that looks so out of place here, its blank, red hue standing out from the idyllic surroundings.
A few young men are leaning against the wall as a white sports car with tinted windows idles in front of them. As I drive past them -- I'm here to look into what someone said was a shooting -- the white car begins to follow me before accelerating and veering to the left, then cutting me off and pulling off to the right of me. What have I gotten myself into? I can't see the driver's face, but he waves me over with his hand.
I pull up beside him and roll down my window, not knowing who he is or what he wants. "Hey, why don't you do a story about how all these cops harass us?" the young man behind the wheel yells to me.
"You know me?" I ask, surprised.
"I know you, man, I read your stories," he says, as if implying, "I'm not stupid; I know what you do."
He rants for a minute and then calms down. We both get out of our cars, and he tells me that a police officer had pulled him over minutes earlier and searched his car. He says he was frisked, and that the inquiry was needless. He's African-American, and he tells me he's 19 and that he graduated from Baldwin High School.
I ask him if he was speeding, or doing anything that would warrant the officer's pulling him over to search him. I remember that he did cut me off. He tells me he did nothing wrong, but says he didn't want to bother with a formal complaint. He also said he hasn't heard of any shootings in the area. We shake hands and drive off, and though we have exchanged phone numbers, I never hear from him again.
Two weeks later I returned, still looking into an alleged shooting, searching for alleged gang members, and several young people had similar gripes about police searches. They said they're just average neighborhood kids, hanging out during the hot summer months, given a bad rap because of the way they dress, and maybe because of their skin color. Short of dressing like they're in Gap commercials, what can they do to convince people they're not gang members?
This is a mixed-race neighborhood, and many of the kids, whether white, black or Hispanic, know one another's names and hang around together. Outside the Corner Store, where the faces by the wall change regularly, kids give each other curled handshakes and "what up"s.
The owner of the store said these are his best customers, but he admitted that some grow angry when he doesn't serve them alcohol and that sometimes at night, they smoke pot, drink or get rowdy. About a month ago, his window was smashed, and someone had thrown eggs at the building. He didn't call the police, he said.
Some residents said the kids pose no problem at all and that this is a quiet neighborhood. But many neighbors said they are concerned about teenagers and young adults roaming the streets, hanging out on corner after corner. One young man on the corner last week was drinking a Heineken, barely concealing it.
But is that gang activity, the kind that has permeated other neighborhoods, in which members abide by codes, use weapons and wear specific colors? The kind of gang in which members slash people in the face for points and street credibility? Or are the kids on Pine Street just local teens grating on neighbors' nerves?
I can certainly understand the fears of concerned residents. After all, there are gang members in Baldwin. The stabbing outside the high school in October helped fuel the alarm here. Several shootings on Grand Avenue and Merrick Road haven't assuaged people's fears, either. And surely, they have legitimate quality-of-life issues they want addressed, issues that police are addressing throughout Baldwin, which they say deter larger crimes such as shootings and assaults. Police said that if officers are stopping people around here, it's for a reason, not on a whim, as kids allege. But even police, as well as residents and young people, said there are no gangs in this stretch of Baldwin, and police maintain that kids hanging out have no known gang affiliation.
So, on the other hand, it's easy to empathize with average young people in their late teens and early 20s, the ones who work honest jobs or go to school. The ones who say they worry about being targeted by police and are angered at being stigmatized as gang members by some in the community. It's not fair, they say, that everyone who languishes on this corner is thought to be a thug or a gang-banger.
Why assume they're all in gangs? The assumption that kids who wear hip-hop clothes or teens who talk too loud and hang out on the corner or that young black and brown men are all gang members is the wrong one. Obviously, for some here, it seems that two plus two makes five.
