The official police statistics show there has been a double-digit decrease in crime in the last year in the Sunset Park section of Brooklyn, with fewer rapes, robberies and car thefts. But the standard scene outside Nereida Rodriguez's window has not changed much. Men deal drugs. Groups of youths, exchanging the handshakes that identify them as gang members, hang out on the street corner. The sirens of police cars and ambulances scream regularly.
"My 5-year-old son sits in that window, in the morning and at night, and he asks me what those people are doing -- if they are bad, if they are going to hurt us," said Ms. Rodriguez, whose apartment looks out on Fifth Avenue. "I try to answer him as best I can. But I don't know."
Betty McClosky, who moved to 63d Street in Sunset Park in 1945, shook her head sadly when asked if the numbers translate into a greater sense of safety.
"For heaven's sake, I had my Thanksgiving decorations -- pictures of turkeys -- stolen," she said. "There are flowers on the sidewalk around the block where a man was murdered a couple of weeks ago. No, I won't go out at night. Fifth Avenue is a disaster -- garbage and gangs. And if I saw anything wrong going on,
I wouldn't report it. Never, never, never. And why? Fear."
As in urban neighborhoods everywhere that have long been plagued by the dual epidemics of drugs and violence, community leaders and residents of Sunset Park say the distance between the reality of their lives and the numbers put out by the Police Department offer a telling example of the sometimes limited meaning and impact of crime statistics.
They believe the numbers are reflective of demographic trends set in motion years ago. They suspect the statistics might be far from entirely accurate, with the neighborhood's ever-increasing population of immigrants typically declining to even report crimes.
They also worry that even if the numbers are accurate, they could could well go up soon, and fast, as youth gangs proliferate and budget cuts eliminate social service programs for the neighborhood's young and poor residents. Just in the last three years the number of youth gangs in Sunset Park has gone from 4 to 25.
"A lot of people here have given up on believing numbers," said Joan Griffin McCabe, the City Councilwoman who represents Sunset Park, a working-class neighborhood populated largely by people of Hispanic and Asian descent. "An incredible fear of reporting crime exists here. I think the numbers are misleading, and I think they will come back to haunt the Mayor. We'll see where the numbers go once the youth programs and the adult literacy programs the Mayor wants yanked are gone."
There is, then, no shortage of unease on the streets on Sunset Park. While problems with street prostitution and street drug dealing have been tackled more effectively lately, some blocks remain off-limits to many residents. With gangs recruiting new members from the neighborhood's junior high schools, both students and parents suffer from a sense of vulnerability and danger poorly captured by official statistics.
And because teen-agers are carrying out much of the mayhem, there is the worry that crimes, even if they occur less frequently, can be more arbitrarily violent. Indeed, though reported robberies dropped by more than 24 percent in 1994 and car thefts fell by nearly 12 percent, shootings in the 72d Precinct were up 30 percent, and violent assaults increased by nearly 4 percent. In Sunset Park, 40 percent of the population is under the age of 18.
"I have got so tired of hearing about statistics," said one 32-year-old mother of three who has spent her entire life in Sunset Park, but asked that she remain anonymous. "What we hear are gunshots -- gunshots at 7:30 in the morning as we put clothes on our children."
Much of the gunfire has been linked to youth gangs, whose numbers, the police say, are multiplying monthly and whose names seem to change almost weekly. There are the Latin Kings, the Netas, Dominicans Don't Play, Gunset, Roughneck Soldiers and United To Crime.
They intimidate crime victims from reporting crimes by stationing a prominent and feared gang member outside the precinct house after another member has been arrested. They stash their guns in bodegas and safe houses until they are needed. They rob mostly immigrants, chiefly the Asian residents who dominate Eighth Avenue and who almost never report the crimes.
"You look at these children, and it is an eerie feeling you get because they almost appear brainwashed," said Hermenia Ramos-Donovan, the director of the Hispanic Young People's Alternative, a social services youth program in Sunset Park.
"The gangs are able to draw in young kids who are vulnerable, and the rest of the neighborhood lives in fear. People will walk down only certain blocks or go completely around specific street corners."
In late December, a 16-year-old and a 22-year-old were shot several times in a confrontation at a Sunset Park subway station. Although both survived, they have declined to cooperate with investigators and will not identify their attackers. Law enforcement officials now say the shooting involved members of two Mexican gangs, and that the victims feared further harm.
"The gangs come to you and tell you they are about Latino pride and the people rising up," said Cindy Rosario, a 19-year-old who rejected a recent offer to join the Latin Queens. "But they are about power. They rob. They slice kids up. They beat members until they bleed if they want to. And if you go to the police, you are dead. That's life."
There are certain aspects about recent life in Sunset Park that most everyone, from the police to the youths to the social service professionals, agrees on.
The officers at the 72d Precinct, empowered by Police Commissioner William J. Bratton's strategy of returning wide-ranging enforcement authority back to the precincts, have become more aggressive and effective. Instead of having to turn over narcotics, prostitution and auto theft investigations to citywide task forces as they had to for years, the officers and detectives can now use their own intelligence to gain their own search warrants to execute their own raids.
"We were the model precinct for community policing, and so we have always been innovative here," said Sgt. Louis Savelli, who directs the precinct's anticrime unit. "But we were held back by our superiors in the department. We were punished or regarded with suspicion for being aggressive.
"The fear was of corruption, and so we were radicals, zealots, crazy," Sergeant Savelli said. "Now, it's a two-way street. The Commissioner has given us the tools to be aggressive. Now, it's community policing with enforcement. Of course, it's going to take a while for the perception that Sunset Park is safer to take hold. The real level of fear at the moment is hard to measure."
It is not tough to gauge for Sister Mary Paul, the director of the Center for Family Life in Sunset Park, which runs after-school, job-training and foster care programs. She said that Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani's efforts to cut the city budget have eliminated $1.3 million that dozens of organizations had relied on and that the rise of youth gangs had threatened to undo a decade of progress in fighting unemployment, crime and infant mortality.
"Sunset Park fought against blight, but I'm afraid we're going to lose what we've gained," Sister Mary Paul said. "The gangs are making appeals to nationalistic loyalty, dividing up the streets that way. It feels almost like Europe, with its ethnic factions. There is fear and anxiety that it is going to get out of control."
Sgt. Ken Corey heads a three-member unit designed to maintain control over the youth gangs of Sunset Park, and he talks enthusiastically about the substantial number of gang arrests his unit has made in recent months. A group of 25 Latin Kings, he said, were arrested one night this fall, another 37 were taken in as part of a subsequent sweep, and his unit is developing a data base of gang intelligence.
"The gangs here are not as bad as they are in other cities, but they are prone to violence," Sergeant Corey said. "Our policy is zero tolerance. But we have to have the help of the people. We have arrests where we turn around on the street and no longer have a victim. He or she has vanished. Look, people are afraid of reporting. I understand."
Paul Mak, one of the leaders of the Chinese-American Association of Sunset Park, concurs. Chinese immigrants, 65,000 of whom live in adjacent parts of Sunset Park, Borough Park and Bay Ridge, are often victimized by stickup gangs as they walk home from the subway station at 62d Street and Eighth Avenue.
"There may be no record at the 72d Precinct of these robberies," Mr. Mak said, "but they are happening, happening bad."
The police concede that a lot of crime in Sunset Park goes unreported, that the gang problem has to be halted quickly, that reduced crime statistics can be interpreted as a hollow boast.
"Look, there is some truth to the notion that numbers can mean whatever you want them to mean," said Capt. Thomas J. Palazzo, the commanding officer of the precinct. "But is Sunset Park safer? I think it is. But whatever we're doing is going to be affected by what's going on with the rest of the criminal justice system -- courts, prisons. What we're doing could be for naught."
