Brooklyn Park tries to build some sense of community
By LORA PABST, Star Tribune
June 7, 2008
What's in a name?
Brooklyn Park residents hope a sense of community.
The city is starting an initiative to name neighborhoods and encourage residents to create neighborhood Web pages. The effort is part of a year-old, citywide collaboration that has teamed police, building inspections staffers and residents to work on reducing crime and improving living conditions in neighborhoods of single-family homes.
Meetings in 11 of the Neighborhood Action Program (NAP) areas around the city will start this week and continue throughout the summer.
"The universal issue for everyone is crime and that's in any neighborhood," said Brian Rogers, a resident of the Brookdale Estates neighborhood who started a website for his community.
Over the past years, Brooklyn Park has faced double-digit increases in violent crime. The city knew it had to act and developed the program.
At the same time, residents such as Rogers and his neighbors began to step up, too.
Last summer, 80 neighbors showed up to a community meeting about crime in the Brookdale Estates neighborhood. Gerry Gibbs, the crime prevention coordinator for the Brooklyn Park Police Department, said the residents were alarmed about recent burglaries and concerned that the city wasn't communicating with them.
After voicing their frustrations, Rogers came up with the idea to call the neighborhood Brookdale Estates and start a Web page where residents could post crime alerts and notices about garage sales and other community events.
"We've always had a well-attended neighborhood watch and National Night Out," Rogers said. "This goes a little beyond that. This is more than once a year."
Now, Gibbs said, the neighborhood is a model the city hopes other residents will follow.
"It was probably the best thing that happened to this neighborhood," Gibbs said. "They feel like they've taken care of some of their own problems."
Seeing results
Across the city, neighborhoods that were identified as focus areas for the NAP have seen progress over the past year. Police officials concentrated on juvenile crime and other crimes that affected the feeling of safety in the neighborhoods, but they also began to look at the root causes of crime.
Officers teamed up with licensing and code enforcement staff members to tackle homes with high numbers of police calls and make sure that single-family homes being turned into rental properties were licensed and inspected.
Crime in the 22 NAP neighborhoods dropped 9.1 percent between 2006 and 2007, while crime in other city neighborhoods dropped only two-tenths of 1 percent, said Brooklyn Park police Capt. Jeff Ankerfelt. Across the city, violent crime dropped 12 percent in the same period.
Now the focus is shifting to a sense of community.
"We can enhance livability, if we can get neighbors to know one another," Ankerfelt said. "We want to create community-based organizations that don't currently exist in Brooklyn Park."
The idea of naming neighborhoods came up after seeing the well-established communities in Minneapolis and St. Louis Park.
After the scheduled neighborhood meetings in Brooklyn Park this summer, Gibbs said, the city will hold a workshop for anyone interested in starting a neighborhood Web page or organizing a neighborhood association.
"I'm not saying we have to play Twister together or go on a bowling league, but you owe it to each other to know who lives [in your neighborhood]," Gibbs said.
Lora Pabst . 612-673-4628
