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January 26, 2011
Atlantic Center Crime Wave Continues, Spreads to Coney Island
The L Magazine
by Henry Stewart
Two weeks ago, police blotter stats revealed that the area around Ratner's Atlantic Yards project had become a hotbed of crime. It wasn't just a fluke: this week's stats report more crime sweeping through the area. A Target shopper had her purse snatched a week ago; four days later, a sexagenarian in Marshall's befell a similar fate, as did a 28-year-old stroller pusher in Target that same day. More seriously, a man tried to assault sexually a woman a block east of the Atlantic Terminal, but she escaped safely.
Earlier this month, I suggested that the problem was a trickle-down effect...of crime! Against a backdrop of mass-criminality like the Atlantic Yards, of course a wave of petty crime would spring up, no? Is that a crazy idea? Where else in Brooklyn have borderline-criminal landgrabs been going on? Ummm....Coney Island? Has there been a spike in crime out there? Oh, actually, the Post reported yesterday that Coney crime has been increasing dramatically. "Last summer there were a lot of murders in Coney Island,” one store owner told the paper. “The incidents of gun violence has increased dramatically." So much so that a Coney Island Coalition Against Violence formed and recently began distributing 1,000 anti-gun-violence posters. Is it really so surprising that more crime would burst out a neighborhood against which so much crime has been committed? Just like how abused children often grow up to abuse their own.
NoLandGrab: We should be clear that Bruce Ratner's malls have been a hotbed of crime for quite a while.
Photo: Kristen Goode, About.com
Posted by eric at January 26, 2011 11:30 AM