Arthur Wallace lit a cigarette while standing in the
middle of Rockaway Boulevard one cold and rainy night last week.
As he took several drags, cars and trucks flew by him
at over 50 miles per hour.
It easily could have been Wallace’s last cigarette
but he shrugged it off by saying it was "one of the nice things I can
do that cops can’t do."
Wallace, the 37-year-old coordinator of the Rosedale
Civilian Patrol was directing traffic around a senior citizen’s disabled
car.
"If you want your neighborhood to be a better
place," Wallace said later during an interview in the warmer, drier
confines of his Chevrolet patrol car, "you need to get involved. That
guy might be my father. That guy might go off and say, ‘You know what,
somebody helped me. Let me go and help someone else.’"
Wallace has been helping "someone else" as a
civilian patrol member for one year, first as a regular member and now as
the Rosedale Civilian Patrol’s effective head and administrative chief.
The 17-member Patrol, one of the most organized and
active in Southeast Queens, is on the cusp of a major expansion at the
hands of Wallace, who recently took over after the previous coordinator,
Donald Herzberger, had to step down for health reasons. Wallace, whose
patrol is affiliated with the 105th Precinct, is now working on a plan
that will link all the little neighborhood watch associations and civilian
patrols of the southern half of Queens into one big ‘super patrol’ of
sorts.
The patrol will be under the auspices of the Police
Department’s Patrol Borough Queens South, which is based in the 107th
Precinct and oversees seven others, including the two in the Rockaways.
Wallace said the new patrol will allow neighborhoods
with smaller patrols—or none at all—to reap the benefits of a large
network of community watchdogs.
It’ll also help the neighborhoods with even the most
active civilian patrols, like Rosedale, he said, which occasionally have
problems getting volunteers together for some nights.
"We’re required to have two people in the
car," Wallace said of the random tours the Rosedale Civilian Patrol
now conducts, for a total of about 26 hours a week. "Many times, we
only had one person [and couldn’t do a tour]. It would be nice to have
more help."
Wallace said his umbrella patrol will also help people
start new individual patrols, or just find about what’s active in their
area, by calling a single phone number.
Civilian patrols perform a host of
activities to improve their neighborhoods, including directing
traffic around
disabled cars.
PRESS Photo By Shams Tarek
|
The React Patrol, as Wallace calls it, is named after
React International, a 40-year-old community watch organization whose
members would monitor CB radio for accidents and has now evolved into
using cell phones and a network of members in the streets.
React International will provide administrative and
legal support to the patrol, covering its non-profit status and providing
insurance for its members.
The React Patrol will be the biggest civilian patrol
group in the borough, covering more than half its population. Wallace said
that while the individual patrols that make up the React Patrol could
either retain their names or adopt the React name, they will continue to
be funded by the community and block associations they grew out of.
Wallace’s work on organizing the civilian patrols of
southern Queens parallels changes at the NYPD that he said are also
designed to bring such groups citywide to order by centralizing their
management.
"The changes are for safety and organization so
patrols can work a lot tighter with the Police Department," Wallace
said. "They’re making it a little more detailed. They’re not
going to be laid-back anymore."
Wallace said that under the new civilian patrol
arrangements, individual precincts will be relieved of much of the
administrative and training work they now do, while gaining more control
in terms of the actual patrol work.
Identification cards and training, for example, will
now go through Patrol Borough Queens South, and patrol coordinators who
will now have to go through the 14-week Civilian Police Academy at Police
Headquarters at One Police Plaza.
Individual precincts will have better records about who’s
going out on civilian patrol and will have more of a hand in coordinating
the patrols and laying out specific guidelines about coverage.
Calls about civilian patrol groups and the changes in
store for them to the Police Department’s press office and each of the
community affairs offices of Patrol Borough Queens South went unreturned
by presstime.
Civilian patrol groups usually grow out of civic
associations and their discussions about quality of life in their
neighborhoods, Wallace said.
"It’s the people in the community," he
said. "They care about the community, [and] they don’t want to see
the community go to hell. If they want their community to be a better
place, they join a civilian patrol."
Joining is easier than starting, though.
The first step in starting a civilian patrol, Wallace
said, is going to the community affairs officer of the local police
precinct. The organizer and the officer determine what’s needed for the
individual block or neighborhood, after which the organizer starts to get
a membership together. Funding and liability, both usually handled by a
sponsoring civic association, then get planned.
After the civilians finish organizing, they all go
through background checks with the Police Department, which then issues
identification cards and amber light permits for patrol cars. The
civilians, who need to be 21 and go through NYPD training, need to get
T-shirts or jackets to identify themselves, as well as three-inch
lettering—removable or permanent—for their patrol cars.
Each civilian patrol also needs to outfit its patrol
cars, which don’t have to be dedicated to the service of the patrol,
with CB radios, mobile phones that dial 911 (activation is not needed for
that service) and road safety and repair equipment that includes cones,
flares and booster cables.
That the 17-year-old Rosedale Civilian Patrol is the
most active one in the 105th Precinct—and possibly all of southern
Queens—is no coincidence.
The long, S-shaped 105th Precinct is unique in that its
headquarters’ location in Queens Village puts it as much as 6.25 miles
from its farthest boundary, to the south below Rosedale.
Elected officials have long criticized the police
department for not providing enough police coverage to people in the
southern part of the precinct.
Wallace said the need for more surveillance in the
southeastern reaches of the precinct—and the borough—is largely what
drove the creation of his patrol.
"You look around the neighborhood and see steel
doors on houses," Wallace said about the changing face of Rosedale,
which he actually just moved out of, to Rockaway Beach, after 19 years
living there. "No one sits out on the porch anymore. Shopping malls
are filled with teenagers hanging out. We shouldn’t have to worry when
our kids come out to play. We should be able to feel safe in our
community."
Wallace’s patrol, which is backed by the Rosedale
Civic Association, doesn’t keep a set patrol schedule, in order to avoid
detection. But if there’s a big event, Rosedale residents, and some in
Laurelton, too, can be sure that the patrol will be there watching.
Civilian patrols typically act as the eyes and ears of
the police department. Their members are not allowed to carry weapons, or
even handcuffs, Wallace said, and they’re encouraged to not confront
people they suspect are committing a crime.
But their reporting abilities—and influence—are
greater than that of most individual citizens, and they have free reign
when it comes to stopping and directing traffic at accident scenes and
around disabled vehicles.
A civilian patrol’s greatest asset, Wallace said, is
its familiarity with the nuances of particular neighborhoods and blocks.
Wallace said that there is a lot of work to be done at
civilian patrols, like clerical and dispatch work, and that not everyone
has to drive around in the rain looking for bad guys and trouble spots.
"Whoever wants to help with the patrol, we’ll
find something for them to do," Wallace said. "You don’t need
vigilantes—you need people with common sense."
