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More News about Police Arrests in Green Acres

The November 3 robbery and shooting at 2600 E. DeKist Street has now been joined by another on November 16th, nearby, at 2531 E. 7th Street, where two men were arrested and charged by IU police with marijuana possession and dealing. I couldn’t figure out how to get this story up online, but you can check it in the Police Beat section in the paper version of the H-T for Monday, November 19.

Re: the November 3rd 2600 DeKist robbery and shooting,  On November 15th, this headline in the H-T:

Bloomington Police: 3 Men Arrested, Fourth Sought in Marijuana Robbery

This story references a different robbery than the one in our neighborhood on November 3rd. But the similarity in these crimes led Bloomington police to suspect the same men for the DeKist robbery and shooting as well. Here’s an excerpt from the story:

“On Oct. 23, three men told police they had been robbed of their cellphones and cash by four or five black men, wearing dark clothing and bandannas over their faces. They reported hearing a knock at their door on the 200 block of East 16th Street, before the men pushed their way into the residence. They said one of the men was armed with a handgun and ordered the residents to the ground, before taking the phones and cash. Two of the men said their personal stashes of marijuana were taken in the robbery, Parker said.

“They also told officers that a pizza had been delivered after the robbery. They ate the pizza before calling police.

“Detectives have uncovered information about other suspects in recent armed robberies of marijuana during their investigation of another robbery on Nov. 3, Parker said.

On Nov. 3, 25-year-old Joshua David Huber, of Cloverdale, died from a single gunshot to the right side of his chest at 2600 E. Dekist St. People in the house told police that five black men, wearing bandannas over their faces and hooded clothing, entered the home and demanded drugs and money.

“During the Dekist Street investigation, police re-interviewed the three men who reported they had been robbed on Oct. 23. They said that a larger amount of marijuana was actually at the residence than they initially reported to police, Parker said. And another person told detectives he told the four robbery suspects about a residence where they could find a large quantity of marijuana.”

Ann K. personal opinion: Isn’t it about time for the state of Indiana to sponsor its own law to legalize marijuana? So many of society’s ills would be erased or transformed with this single change in the culture. Make it legal and tax it!

Juxtaposing polarities . . .

Last Sunday afternoon we did some literal “heavy lifting” in the Green Acres Neighborhood Garden.

GANG Garden Event: Hugelculture! — plus dinner and dreaming

Notice in the photos of the event, the house behind the ones that show the new hugelculture beds in the garden. That’s the house where the shooting took place only ten days ago.

We were creating the conditions for resurgence of new life  directly across from the very street from where the worst situation most of us can imagine actually played out in real time just ten days ago. Juxtaposing polarities. Juggling realities. Choosing to move forward with what’s right and good and connected, what nourishes us, what we can all get behind.

Let’s transform the “War Zone” — into community

Looking from my porch, through the neighborhood garden (GANG) across DeKist to the house where a young man was shot and later died last Saturday night.

The tragic events of two nights ago make it even more imperative that we begin to think of our neighborhoods in new ways. Especially here in college towns where so many of us live near student “party houses,” mostly rentals, with absentee landlords.

This morning, I came across a video, on “Village Towns.” Here’s the blurb about it:

“A VillageTown is a 10,000 population
town made up of 20 villages. Within
there are no cars, it has its own
local economy, and its purpose is to
enable its citizens to enjoy a “good life”,
understood as the social pursuits of
conviviality, citizenship, artistic,
intellectual & spiritual growth.”

Great! I thought. Let’s go! This could be a great way to introduce the idea of showing how Green acres could become an actual functioning, at least quasi-self-sufficient village, networked inside a web of other self-sufficient neighborhood villages, each with its own character and charm and way of life, and all of them integrated into the dense web of life we call Bloomington, Indiana.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. Instead, this little video appears to be one more developer’s dream, focusing on “from the ground up” building of what look essentially, to me, like Disney villages, theme parks. Yuck! I couldn’t even bring myself to finish it.

Here’s the question that has haunted me for the last ten years: Why build new infrastructure when we can change perceptions in our existing neighborhoods? 

Rather than chucking the built environment, starting over from scratch and using even more of Earth’s resources, let’s change our perceptions of living where we actually do live! Yes, even here, in this college town where students stream through every year, or two, or four, texting on their phones, or listening through earbuds, walking to and from IU on our Green Acres streets blind to the fact that they actually live in a neighborhood with others.

Green Acres is a typical Bloomington core neighborhood: 66% of the houses in Green Acres are registered rentals — mostly to students.

Let’s help our students learn how to redirect their energies from loud, mindless, all-night parties and the accompanying trouble that invites (see this) and instead focus their boundless energy where it counts: on growing food; on changing zoning laws to get small businesses back in neighborhoods; on working for strong public transportation and bike paths everywhere; on helping elders and children stay in the neighborhood together; on creating common spaces in which we can gather, on feeling safe. All of us.

As the students stream through our villages, they pick up another way of life, one which hearkens back to their great grandparents, before they were born, when people helped each other out, when they knew lots of skills — gardening, sewing, mending, fixing, tinkering — and passed them on to the young ones. And when they would gather, in living rooms and on porches, over bonfires, to tell stories, to find out about each others’ lives, all the while knitting a closely woven sense of being in this together, this little life of ours, this one that caught us up in the glamorous, glittery illusion of individualism and greedy materialism for far too long and that is now swinging back home, big time.

Some of these students might even decide to stick around when their college years are over. Start families. In the past two years, I’ve seen young mothers with strollers and buggies walking through Green Acres. If we’re very very lucky, this trend will continue. Green Acres might again be a place where children run in packs through the neighborhood, ignoring property lines and fences, hanging out in trees, playing hopscotch on the streets, slowing down cars to offer them lemonade from homemade stands . . .

Remember that?

Let’s place our feet where they are actually planted, right here at home. Relocalization begins in the household, then with our next door neighbors, and with others on our blocks, moving out from there. Who are your neighbors? Get to know them. You might need each other some day.

For much more on visioning Green Acres as a village, click on GANE.

Green Acres A War Zone?

It sure feels like it. Two women stalked in the late evening, on two separate occasions, each one while walking home. Then, several weeks ago, a drive-by(?) shooting at a party on Clark St. around 2 AM. Because of these incidents, we asked the police to meet with us. Here is the report of that meeting.

Then, two nights ago, at 11:48 P.M., the unspeakable happened. Here is what we have been told. Five hooded men with faces masked, entered the house at 2600 E. DeKist, a “grandfathered” rental (up to five occupants) that, as long as I’ve been here (ten years) has always been rented to students. There, they demanded drugs and money, and pistol whipped the occupants, including a young visitor, 25 years old. A struggle ensued, a gun went off, wounding the young man who fell to the floor. Someone ran across the street and asked neighbors to call the police. The young man was transported to the hospital, where he later died.

Here’s the story, as it appeared in the H-T this morning.

This morning, a black truck with tinted windows drove down Overhill, taking pictures. One neighbor saw it, and called the police to see if this truck was a detective. No. She then put out an alert to our green acres email list, to let others know about the truck.

If you wish to get on this list, please let us know.

Remember, if any of us see anything suspicious, please do not hesitate to call the police. As they emphasized in their meeting with us, we are their eyes and ears.

Police have been clustering in front of 2600 E. DeKist, and combing DeKist and Overhill on foot, interviewing neighbors.

This is a wake-up call. We need to be aware of our environment, acutely aware. And we need to be aware of each other, and have our own and each other’s safety in mind. The more we communicate, the better we know each other, the more we share our lives in community, the better off we will all be.

Let this terrible tragedy be a crisis that transforms into opportunity.

GANA Meeting Report: October 23, 2012

Dear neighbors,

We met for the first time in over a year, and at a new, and very sweet location, the Reading Room of the Christian Science Church, 2425 East Third (that’s our side of 3rd Street, inside the neighborhood!). There were ten of us present, three of whom had not been participants in GANA before. A number of people had called to say that they could not make it due to other commitments.

The main impetus for the meeting was to discuss safety and security issues that have been arising in the neighborhood. To this end we invited the Bloomington Police Department to send a representative. Well, they sent two! Joe Qualters, who heads up neighborhood relations, and Blake Cunningham, who is one of the officers who regularly patrols our neighborhood.

Contact info for Qualters:

qualterj@bloomington.in.gov
phone and voicemail: 349-3417

We decded that it would be best if there is one person in the neighborhood who is the liaison to the police department, and Jelene agreed to take that on. In emergencies of any kind however, we were instructed to not call the police but instead call 911.

We sent about an hour with these two men, and our discussion was extremely fruitful. First, we heard three important, and difficult to hear, stories:

1. One woman, present at the meeting, had been stalked a few weeks ago at about 11 p.m. when walking home (her car had broken down). She noticed a man in a big truck going slowly back and forth. He stopped ahead of her, got out. She decided not to go that way. But he kept coming, cutting across lawns towards her. A huge man, she said. She grew desperate. What to do? At the last minute a car drove between her and the man and she hailed the car, and got in.

2. Another woman at the meeting told about her partner’s experience: she had been driving home around ten o’clock at night. She noticed a big man on a bicycle. He got off his bicycle, and started furtively cutting across through the dark towards a young woman walking home. Then he stopped, ahead of the woman, hiding behind a tree on the other side of the road from where she was walking. The woman’s partner who saw this whole scenario turned around, drove up and parked her truck between the man hiding, and the young woman, until she got safely into her house.

3. Re: that party on Clark Street where shots were fired: the woman who lived next to that house was at the meeting, and told of being terrified. Her two young grandchildren were spending the night. More and more people started coming to that house, loud booming music, of course, and the crowd spilling into her back yard. Meanwhle, she was terrified to go outside and frantically trying to find her phone to call the police. Finally, at around 2 am when the shots were fired, she did find her phone, and called. Three patrol cars arrived within seconds, so she assumes someone else had already called.

In the first two cases, of stalking, the women involved did not call the police. We spent quite a bit of time looking at the way we tend NOT to call the police, because we don’t want to bother them unnecessarily. But as Joe Qualters pointed out, “This is our JOB. And you are our eyes and ears!”

We do have to be aware that the police have priorities. There are a minimum of ten patrol cars out on patrol at any point, covering the four quadrants of the city. Parking issues, for example, do not have high priority. But loud parties, and certainly violence of any kind, or dangerous situations like stalking, do. Any little bit of information helps. Sometimes a description of someone in one possibly criminal act will help identify the perp in another act, so that they can see a pattern. If there are parties, where the police are called, and they come and warn the people there, and the party revs back up after they leave, then, Qualter insists, call the police back. They need to know when a warning was not enough. They will come back and issue a citation. First offense, $50, and it goes up from there.

VANDALISM: Qualters said that often what happens is when the students go on breaks, folks that they don’t know but who have come to their parties go in and rob them, especially looking for small electronics. So if neighbors keep watch over students’ houses during breaks, it would be helpful to the police.

(A.K.: We might look again at the Neighborhood Watch Program: http://www.ci.bloomington.mn.us/cityhall/dept/police/specops/crime_prevention/neiwatch.htm)

NOISE: go to http://bloomington.in.gov/documents/viewDocument.php?document_id=829 to read about it. (The discussion we had that night felt unclear to me.) Noise problems? Call 339-4477.

PARKING AND TRAFFIC ON HILLSDALE: We all agreed that once the Bypass is finished, traffic should slow at least somewhat. Some talk about resurrecting the idea of speed bumps, though one woman said she likes the idea of parked cars on both sides of the street, because that slows down traffic. (I agree!)

SPECIAL NEEDS AND MEDICAL CONDITIONS: The police department has a program to address this for people who may need help, for example, by letting the police know where an extra key is stored if they need to get in to help them in some kind of an emergency.

The police agreed to email us pdfs of safety tips of various kinds.

After about an hour, the police left and we briefly discussed one other item on our agenda, that of painting the electrical box at the corner of 3rd and Hillsdale. We have been given money for art supplies, and Georgia will write a proposal for a Small and Simple Grant due February 1st. Jim and Georgia agreed to work on getting a few artists to sketch the design that might work out, email these sketches to our GANA list for feedback and then select an artist who will be paid by the Small and Simple Grant.

Other business: Jim agreed to take over the GANA list-serve from Jane. Ann agreed to revamp and update the GANA website.

Our next meeting will be in early January, though the Executive Committee (Ann and Georgia and anyone else who wants to be on it) will meet before then.

Ann Kreilkamp
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