'Tribal' tension in Crown Heights keeps neighborhood from moving
beyond hate
Wednesday, April 23rd 2008, 11:03 AM
The assault on Andrew Charles prompted response from city. Rosier/News
The assault on Andrew Charles prompted response from city.
Nearly 17 years after riots tore Crown Heights apart, the recent
beating of a black college student by Jewish assailants has exposed
rising tensions between blacks and Jews in my neighborhood.
Cops and city officials have quietly gone on high alert, worried that
another riot could be in the works.
The troubles began on April 14, when Andrew Charles, a 20-year-old
sophomore at Kingsborough Community College, says he and a friend
encountered a pair of young Jewish men while walking down Albany Ave.
about 6 p.m.
"One was on bike, one was on foot. They were staring at us, staring us
down," Charles told me. "We stared back. They approached us and asked
if we had a problem."
The man on the bike sprayed Charles with tear gas, and a few minutes
later a contingent of Jewish men arrived by car and in scooters and
began chasing them.
One man beat Charles on the back and arm with a nightstick, inflicting
injuries that sent him to the hospital. The group fled, but not before
a witness on the street got the license plate number.
In any other neighborhood, a staredown between young men, even one
that turns into a beatdown, would barely count as major news.
But this is Crown Heights, where a smoldering pile of intergroup
grievances and injustices - some real, many imaginary - set the stage
for the shocking outburst of mob violence in August 1991.
According to a memo circulated by Mayor Bloomberg's Community
Assistance Unit, city officials immediately descended on Crown Heights
last week to establish "contact with the [Charles] family before
outside agitators could jump in and reach out to the family to create
community turmoil."
I don't know which "outside agitators" the mayor's people were afraid
of, but community activist Taharka Robinson, founder of the Central
Brooklyn Anti-Violence Coalition, is acting as Charles' adviser. The
family also has retained Paul Wooten, a well-known Brooklyn lawyer
recently nominated for a Supreme Court judgeship.
Robinson and Wooten are reliable, levelheaded men. They will have
their work cut out for them.
At the urging of city officials, a group of leaders from both
communities will meet tomorrow - "before the Sean Bell verdict," the
Community Assistance Unit memo cautions - to figure out a way to dial
down the tension.
In the neighborhood's calculus of tribal resentments, the attack on
Charles was the mirror image of a January incident in which a teenage
yeshiva student named Samuel Balkany said five black kids jumped and
beat him, shouting "little Jew boy, you think you own this
neighborhood," and such.
Despite a call from authorities for help in solving the case, nobody
was arrested for the Balkany beating. Let enough of these tribal
skirmishes accumulate, and you end up with a neighborhood ready to
explode.
Last week, much to their credit, cops from the 71st Precinct and
Patrol Borough Brooklyn South quickly began a full-court press to
solve the latest beating, with an extra incentive supplied by the fact
that Charles' father, Moses Charles, is a cop in Brooklyn's 70th
Precinct.
The NYPD swiftly found the attackers' car in East New York, stripped
of plates but still traceable. At the car owner's home, according to
the Community Assistance Unit memo, cops arrested a man - believed to
be the brother of the car's owner - for interfering with government
administration, and later released him.
All along the way, local politicians and community leaders - both
black and Jewish - have been talking.
It's a rotten shame that people in my neighborhood haven't figured out
how to live side by side, and an embarrassment that we have to rely on
cops and nervous bureaucrats to keep the peace.
Nowhere in the city will you find more devout religious people than in
Crown Heights, yet it has come to this - shortly after Easter and the
Pope's visit, and in the middle of the Jewish High Holy Days.
'Tribal' tension in Crown Heights keeps neighborhood from moving
beyond hate
Wednesday, April 23rd 2008, 11:03 AM
The assault on Andrew Charles prompted response from city. Rosier/News
The assault on Andrew Charles prompted response from city.
Nearly 17 years after riots tore Crown Heights apart, the recent
beating of a black college student by Jewish assailants has exposed
rising tensions between blacks and Jews in my neighborhood.
Cops and city officials have quietly gone on high alert, worried that
another riot could be in the works.
The troubles began on April 14, when Andrew Charles, a 20-year-old
sophomore at Kingsborough Community College, says he and a friend
encountered a pair of young Jewish men while walking down Albany Ave.
about 6 p.m.
"One was on bike, one was on foot. They were staring at us, staring us
down," Charles told me. "We stared back. They approached us and asked
if we had a problem."
The man on the bike sprayed Charles with tear gas, and a few minutes
later a contingent of Jewish men arrived by car and in scooters and
began chasing them.
One man beat Charles on the back and arm with a nightstick, inflicting
injuries that sent him to the hospital. The group fled, but not before
a witness on the street got the license plate number.
In any other neighborhood, a staredown between young men, even one
that turns into a beatdown, would barely count as major news.
But this is Crown Heights, where a smoldering pile of intergroup
grievances and injustices - some real, many imaginary - set the stage
for the shocking outburst of mob violence in August 1991.
According to a memo circulated by Mayor Bloomberg's Community
Assistance Unit, city officials immediately descended on Crown Heights
last week to establish "contact with the [Charles] family before
outside agitators could jump in and reach out to the family to create
community turmoil."
I don't know which "outside agitators" the mayor's people were afraid
of, but community activist Taharka Robinson, founder of the Central
Brooklyn Anti-Violence Coalition, is acting as Charles' adviser. The
family also has retained Paul Wooten, a well-known Brooklyn lawyer
recently nominated for a Supreme Court judgeship.
Robinson and Wooten are reliable, levelheaded men. They will have
their work cut out for them.
At the urging of city officials, a group of leaders from both
communities will meet tomorrow - "before the Sean Bell verdict," the
Community Assistance Unit memo cautions - to figure out a way to dial
down the tension.
In the neighborhood's calculus of tribal resentments, the attack on
Charles was the mirror image of a January incident in which a teenage
yeshiva student named Samuel Balkany said five black kids jumped and
beat him, shouting "little Jew boy, you think you own this
neighborhood," and such.
Despite a call from authorities for help in solving the case, nobody
was arrested for the Balkany beating. Let enough of these tribal
skirmishes accumulate, and you end up with a neighborhood ready to
explode.
Last week, much to their credit, cops from the 71st Precinct and
Patrol Borough Brooklyn South quickly began a full-court press to
solve the latest beating, with an extra incentive supplied by the fact
that Charles' father, Moses Charles, is a cop in Brooklyn's 70th
Precinct.
The NYPD swiftly found the attackers' car in East New York, stripped
of plates but still traceable. At the car owner's home, according to
the Community Assistance Unit memo, cops arrested a man - believed to
be the brother of the car's owner - for interfering with government
administration, and later released him.
All along the way, local politicians and community leaders - both
black and Jewish - have been talking.
It's a rotten shame that people in my neighborhood haven't figured out
how to live side by side, and an embarrassment that we have to rely on
cops and nervous bureaucrats to keep the peace.
Nowhere in the city will you find more devout religious people than in
Crown Heights, yet it has come to this - shortly after Easter and the
Pope's visit, and in the middle of the Jewish High Holy Days.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny_crime/2008/04/23/2008-04-23_tribal_tension_in_crown_heights_keeps_ne.html?123
|
