Neighborhood Watch – Memphis Flyer

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A couple of weeks after teenagers involved in a flash mob beat three people in the Poplar Plaza Kroger parking lot, residents of the High Point Terrace neighborhood are still worried about being victimized when they travel to the grocery store.

Many of those concerned residents gathered in the Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church’s Fellowship Hall during the High Point Terrace Neighborhood Watch and Association’s meeting Wednesday night.

The event brought together more than 150 people: area residents, elected officials, Memphis city councilmen, Shelby County commissioners, employees from both the Poplar Plaza Kroger and CiCi’s Pizza (where the teens met up before the Kroger parking lot situation), and representatives from Shelby County Juvenile Court, law enforcement, and civic organizations.

Locals submitted questions about crime in the area — primarily the Kroger incident and what’s being done to make sure a similar occurrence doesn’t take place in the future.

“I want to know what protection they’re going to have in the parking lot to control this,” said one long-time High Point resident. “My way of thinking is, the kids should not be there in a group anymore. They should be monitored. I just want to see that it doesn’t happen again. There needs to be more parental control. And there has to be some justification for your actions.”

Various members of law enforcement commented on the Kroger issue and disclosed how they’re working to better assure the safety of all community residents.

Tillman Precinct Commander Colonel Terry Landrum informed the crowd that a new surveillance camera had been installed at the Poplar Plaza Kroger. Landrum said that he’s diverted some of Tillman Precinct’s bike patrol to the Poplar area and has also increased the number of police cruisers patrolling the area.

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Landrum also revealed that Finard Properties, the company that owns the Poplar Plaza property, had increased security there, and Kroger is considering hiring uniformed patrol officers.

“Poplar Plaza was a terrible incident to occur. There was no real warning that it was going to happen,” Landrum said. “It’s regrettable. It’s something that we don’t expect to happen again. I cannot promise you that it won’t happen again. It can happen anywhere. Since this incident, we’ve taken every step that we should’ve taken to make sure this does not happen again.”

Other people who spoke during the meeting included Memphis Police Department Deputy Chief Clete Knight, Deputy District Attorney General Jennifer Nichols, Shelby County Juvenile Court Detention Center Administrator Gary Cummings, Rick Smith of Finard Properties, Memphis City Councilwoman Wanda Halbert, and Shelby County Commission Chairman Justin Ford.

Each person shared ideas on what can be done to make sure no one else is victimized in Poplar Plaza and throughout the community. Many of the ideas involved mentoring to at-risk youth and having more churches and schools open up their gyms for teens to utilize outside of school hours.

“Have you seen a great spike of churches opening up at night to offer their gyms? Have you seen Shelby County Schools open up their gyms to offer the kids something to do?” inquired Shelby County Commissioner Mark Billingsley. “Unfortunately, the answer is no. Instead of waiting another year for us to do nothing, you’ve got to hold people like me, and the city council, accountable. Six months from now, you need to hold another one of these [meetings] to say, ‘What schools do we have open at night? What churches are open at night? And how many people in this room are mentoring a child?’ I would just encourage you, if anything, [to do that], or [crime] will be a bullet away from your family.”

Right before Labor Day, almost 400 residents of Colonial Acres received a disturbing e-mail. One of their neighbors, grandfather Rick Green, had been run over — in broad daylight — near his house.

Over the next few days, the neighbors received updates on the situation the same way:

that Green was at the Med; that it looked like he had been hit intentionally; that he had suspected drug dealing at a nearby home and had started taking pictures of visiting cars; that he had been released from the Med; and, sadly, that he passed away September 3rd at home.

The Colonial Acres Neighborhood Association (CANA) has been using e-mail updates for four years, but the bulletins traditionally detailed property thefts and suspicious activities, not violent crimes.

“There’s no question that there was a common sense of anger and outrage and sympathy. It was a violation of the whole neighborhood,” said Ron, CANA Neighborhood Watch and Safety co-chair. (Citing safety concerns, CANA leaders asked that their last names not be used.)

The e-mail list, which began with about 50 subscribers, helped to disseminate the information as quickly and as accurately as possible.

“I believe in sharing information,” said group founder David, a middle-age man with curly, light-colored hair. “I saw an unmet need.”

David now acts as the group’s “switchboard operator,” taking tips about suspicious activity and sending them — along with information on upcoming events and possible developments — to the entire group. The end result is a virtual neighborhood watch that supplements traditional efforts.

“In any neighborhood watch,” David said, “ideally you have block captains, and it’s really localized. If you don’t have that, this is the next best thing.”

Networking by e-mail also seems a natural extension. CANA isn’t the only local neighborhood group online, but one of the reasons they agreed to be interviewed was to share the idea with groups that aren’t. If people can fall in love via the Internet or have MySpace friends, why not connect with your neighbors the same way?

“People don’t go out and meet their neighbors like they should. This is a way of doing it virtually,” Ron said. “I think it adds a sense of connectivity.”

Though a live neighborhood watch includes seeing someone going into your neighbor’s backyard and calling police, the e-mail group serves more to identify crime trends within the neighborhood. In one case, residents started seeing several people in a pick-up truck driving through the neighborhood. They shared their suspicions via e-mail, and then other people noticed the truck, too.

“As a result, they were stopped by police,” David said. “They got them for an expired license, and they were told they were being watched by the police as a result.”

CANA leaders also use local law enforcement databases to “watch” known criminals who have a history of targeting Colonial Acres.

“The public is the first line of defense. I think David’s list makes use of that aspect of awareness,” Ron said. “We have three tools other than the police: awareness, prevention, and self-defense. Sans police, you have to take care of yourself and your neighbors.”

Unfortunately, that seems to be what Rick Green was trying to do.

After Green’s death, driver Untonio Ratliff was charged with vehicular homicide and leaving the scene of an accident involving death, both felonies.

When the coroner’s report came back last week, however, it determined that Green’s official cause of death was cardiac arrest. Ratliff’s charges were amended to aggravated assault and leaving the scene of an accident involving injury.

“It’s had me pretty upset that they lowered the charges,” Wanda told attendees of a CANA neighborhood meeting last week, citing the statements of two witnesses. “It was obvious that it was intentional. The car went down the street, did a U-turn, and then came back at him.”

The three acknowledge that in the wake of Green’s death, they have some safety concerns.

“There were five young men out there watching this happen,” said Wanda, a slim woman with short brown hair. “I wouldn’t want to see a dog run over, much less a human. There are five young men out there who obviously thought nothing of injuring someone like that. That’s a scary thought.”

But, even in a city recently named by the FBI as the worst metro area for violent crime, the group says the potential of their virtual neighborhood watch far outweighs the risk.

“We’re angry, sad,” Ron said. “It’s natural to feel some sense of fear. But that’s not going to keep us from continuing to do what we need to do to keep our neighborhood safe and watch out for each other.”