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April 17, 2008
High crime in the footprint? Officers head, instead, to the mall
Atlantic Yards Report
Remember the Empire State Development Corporation's Blight Study? Its claims of high crime in the Atlantic Yards footprint were dubious, as I wrote in July 2006, and Supreme Court Justice Joan Madden, in her January dismissal of the case challenging the Atlantic Yards environmental review, punted on assessing the issue.
NoLandGrab: The "Blight Study" justified the State's use of eminent domain to convey private property to developer Bruce Ratner, who incidentally owns the Atlantic Terminal and Atlantic Center Malls.
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Well, now comes a piece of evidence that further challenges the study's claims. The Daily News, in a story published Tuesday on a "crime wave" in Clinton Hill, reports:
The need for a police presence at the Atlantic Terminal Mall is also cutting into the ranks of officers policing the community, the source said.
Norman Oder goes back to NY State's original blight study report, which concluded that based on crime data "obtained from the security staff at the shopping centers... no robberies occurred that year at Atlantic Center or Atlantic Terminal," therefore, "the high crime rate in sector 88E is more likely a result of crimes occurring on the project site than in Atlantic Center or Atlantic Terminal."
And now, thanks to that police source, we learn that the police are concentrating on a mall that gets a lot of foot traffic, which certainly makes sense.
Could it be that mall security staff, whose records indicate that only one incident of grand larceny--theft of property of more than $250 in value--occurred during a year, according to the Blight Study, might be fudging the books?
Posted by lumi at April 17, 2008 5:31 AM