This just in from today's ProJo.
Providence man, 20, wounded in shooting
01:00 AM EDT on Monday, July 14, 2008
PROVIDENCE — A 20-year-old man was shot in the back while sitting with a 15-year-old boy outside a building in the Pleasant Court apartment complex on Doyle Avenue yesterday afternoon.
Derrick Dacruz, who lives on nearby Pleasant Street, was taken to Hasbro Children’s Hospital with a single gunshot wound that Police Chief Dean M. Esserman described as not life-threatening. The boy was not hit.
The shooting occurred shortly after 3:30 p.m. in a courtyard between rows of apartment buildings. Neighbors reported hearing six or seven gunshots and then seeing two young men running east on Doyle Avenue toward Camp Street.
Capt. Hugh Clements said neighbors reported seeing the pair get into a silver-colored car and speed away.
The car, Clements said, matched the description of a car involved in an incident minutes later on southbound Route 95 near the Route 146/State House exit. There, according to the police, gunshots were fired from a silver Nissan; witnesses provided a license plate to the police, who said the car had been reported stolen in Cranston.
The police were trying to determine whether the shooting and the gunshots incident were linked.
According to court records, Dacruz pleaded no contest last August to charges of drug possession and was given 18 months’ probation.
— AMANDA MILKOVITS
--Submitted by Peter Cassels
Posted at 5:15 PM | | Comments (0)
The Blessing of the Windshield
The Blessing of the Windshield
Around 7:15 on the evening of July 8, I pulled out of the parking lot of my condo building at the Crossings and was blocked from going through the intersection by young males wrestling in the crosswalk. I honked my horn a couple of times, but they totally ignored me, so I
leaned on the horn for a couple of minutes solid. A friend of theirs with a skinny little pitbull threw water on my windshield from a bottle he was holding. I don't think it was holy water.
I turned the corner, got out of my car and confronted him. I told him I owned a unit in the building and did not appreciate him throwing water on my car. He said, "I don't care how many condos you own. I don't appreciate you honking your horn at my friends." I told him they were blocking the intersection. (Where are the police when you need them?)
He said, "Do you want to take it around the corner?" I said, "okay." We had more exchange of words on Larch Street, then I peeled rubber shooting up the street.
Just wanted to share that story with you.
I'll be moving later this month to the wilds of Coventry. I'll not miss Mt. Hope one iota.
Peter Cassels
Posted at 2:52 PM | Community | Comments (0)
Enduring Racial Slurs and Laughing in Mt. Hope!
Incredible Improvement in Mt. Hope Neighborhood
Tonight as I walked back home from the convenient store on the corner of Camp and Cypress I came across a young African American resident of Mt. Hope urinating in the front yard of my property on Camp Street. He was part of a group of about 10 or 12 young African Americans hanging out in Billy Taylor Park after the basketball league game tonight. As I walked past this group of young African American residents of Mt. Hope several of them began making racial comments behind my back: grey- haired Cracker, white asshole, etc., you get the drift. I asked the person who was urinating in my front yard, how he could do that on someone’s property, and that person apologized and told me that he was desperate and couldn’t hold it, and, having been in that same situation myself, I accepted that, but asked why he couldn’t have gone down into the park to do his business. He apologized again, and that was that,but his cohorts back in the park kept on with the racial slurs. I just laughed.
Grafitti on White Residents House on Knowles Street
I laughed because I understand their frustration, and I understand what is euphemistically called “reverse racism”, understand that racism is as pervasive among African Americans, if not greater, than any other racial segment of our society. Many African Americans hate white people, and this is especially true in Mt. Hope.
I have endured many racial slurs directed my way from African Americans since I moved to Mt. Hope 12 years ago. I always laugh, because I understand.
I laugh because I understand that the old ways have passed on in Mt. Hope and that much needed change has come, that it is no longer “business as usual in Mt. Hope” with drug dealers on every corner, drug dealers cruising around in rental cars, garbage and trash being tossed on the street and that behavior being accepted, indiscriminate noise, blasting rap music, disorderly conduct, urinating in public, public nuisance properties, this is gone the way of the old Mt. Hope. In the new Mt. Hope none of this is tolerated.
So, of course there is frustration in the dwindling African American community in Mt. Hope who are invested in the drug business. For too long the African Americans who were so deeply invested in the drug culture ran the neighborhood, to the detriment of most residents regardless of race, but no more.
African Americans involved in embezzling government funds from non-profit neighborhood organizations, a virtual patronymic grasp by the Brown family on the organization called the Mt. Hope Neighborhood Organization (a neighborhood organization in name only), and a councilman who acted as an enabler to criminal behavior from drug dealing to misappropriation of government funds to embezzlement, contributing to the chaos that was then Mt. Hope. Check the public records of the Camp Street Ministries and the Mt. Hope Neighborhood Association if you have any doubts as to the veracity of these rumours.
"We own this neighborhhod!"
I’ll never forget the day, many years ago, when I went outside my house to break up a drug deal taking place on my street, and a young African American drug dealer told me, “We own this neighborhood, this has always been a drug neighborhood!”
Well, no more, Buddy, your day is done. Mt. Hope has changed and your type is no longer tolerated.
How did this change come about? Hard work, lots of lobbying of City Hall, demanding equal services of the City, especially the Police Department. Countless phone calls, letters, community activism. Lobbying for symbolic changes.
Let's make a list.
1. Getting the City to cut the tall hedges at the corner of Camp & Cypress. Drug dealers hid between the 8 foot tall hedges and dealt drugs day and night from that cover, and people were actually afraid to drive through that intersection. I convinced Bob McMahon, of the Parks Department, to cut them down. That eliminated their cover and largely eliminated drug dealing from the corner of Camp & Cypress.
2. The stop sign on the corner of Camp & Jenkins and the blinking stop lights on the corner of Camp & Cypress. I convinced the DPW to install these signs to interupt the flow of drug dealers who cruised the neighborhood in rental cars, giving the police more probable cause to stop drug dealers. Also, before the stop sign at Camp & Jenkins, cars would routinely get up to 60 mp on Camp between Cypress and Doyle.
3. Targeting nuisance properties, with the Attorney General’s Task Force, code enforcement, and the PD, where drug dealing flourished, especially the Perry house at Camp & Grandview, which for years was under construction and a nexus for drug dealing in the neighborhood.
4. The GCCC meeting where we cornered and chased Col. Esserman from the meeting over the shooting up of the District 8 substation and the impotence of the the police to act on the matter. Within days a news conference was called and an arrest made and charges filed in the case.
For years I, through the GCCC, lobbied for the following:
5. The removal of the horrible, tacky, violent drug glorifying mural in Billy Taylor Park: GONE!
6. The tacky, ghetto mural on the wall of the so called Mt. Hope Neighborhood Association at 199 Camp Street: GONE
7. The constant garbage in front of the Camp Street Ministries across from MHNA: GONE!
8. The re-routing of one-way streets in Mt. Hope to curb drug trafficking: it only took several more shootings, but the City finally changed Pleasant Street, the most notorious drug dealing street in Providence, to a one-way street up from N. Main, thus radically altering the ability of drug dealers to control Pleasant Street: DONE!
9. The June 10, 2007 riot in Billy Taylor Park: solely the responsibility of Councilman Jackson for pulling an illegal permit and failing to notify the police of the event in the park.
This served, for me, as the last straw: I hired a legal team and took legal action against the City. The action is still pending. But my lawyers discovered an ongoing pattern of systemic violations of City Ordinances for almost every permit pulled for Billy Taylor Park, and most permits featured the involvement of Councilman Kevin Jackson.
This legal action put the City on notice that this type of feudal governance by a City Councilor will no longer be tolerated and that the City is legally responsible for their adhering to or violating their own City Ordinances. DONE!
Relentless
It all adds up. If you want to change things you must be relentless. You can’t ask the police to do it for you. And you sure can't count on the liberal enablers. You have to hammer away at the powers that be. You must be relentless.
Mt. Hope has changed for the better. There is no comparison to what it was even a few years ago. We changed the way business is done in Mt. Hope. We changed the way the City thinks about Mt. Hope. We made it uncomfortable for criminals in Mt. Hope.
That’s why I laugh at racial slurs from African American drug dealers. I’m enjoying the New Mt. Hope. I’m enjoying my success. I hope all law abiding citizens in Mt. Hope are enjoying my success too.
I came to Mt. Hope as a knee-jerk liberal, but now, I'm a changed man. Thanks, Mt.Hope, for educating me.
John Twomey
Posted at 1:09 AM | Community | Comments (0)
