Kensington community members wonder if increased police focus will make a difference

Mayli Gaita is used to political candidates talking about Kensington, the neighborhood she grew up in. She’s used to their promises to change Kensington, which is known for its open-air drug market; and she’s used to those promises being forgotten once they get elected into office.

So when Mayor Cherelle L. Parker announced last week that the Police Department tapped a new deputy commissioner, Pedro Rosario, with the single job of leading the department’s Kensington initiative, Gaita and other Kensington residents had an amalgamation of responses: relief tempered by wary hope and skeptical anticipation.

Like elected officials before her, Parker has vowed to shut down Kensington’s open-air drug market. But top of mind for community members is how, exactly, that will be done.

Gaita enjoyed growing up in Kensington.

She and her friends would run around outside and play tag, jump double dutch or kick around a soccer ball. These are fond memories for Gaita, now 38, so when she started a family of her own, she knew she wanted to raise her daughters in Kensington as well.

When people in addiction began coming to her neighborhood, however, and even tried to sleep on her front porch, Gaita and her neighbors frequently called the police and ambulances to remove them.

“We can always do better.”

What was once a relatively normal neighborhood where Gaita and her family would go to barbecues in the park, became one where Gaita wouldn’t let her 10- and 8-year-old outside because the park was covered with needles. And when they drove by people shooting up one day, her daughters peppered her with questions: Why are they out of the hospital? Why are they doing that?

It’s a scene Gaita knows wouldn’t be tolerated for one day in a rich, white neighborhood.

“We, as minorities, get promised so many things,” Gaita said. “But once they get elected, they forget about us. I just want some change.”

Rosario, who previously covered Kensington as a captain in the city’s East Division, is familiar with the unsuccessful strategies in a neighborhood he describes as “incredibly resilient.”

“That’s the first word that comes to mind when I think about them,” Rosario said. “These are a group of people that have always been seen as a less-than community, and it’s unfortunate because there are so many great aspects of that neighborhood that are jewels of our city.”

» READ MORE: As city leaders try to improve Kensington, they too often leave out community members

And the feeling of not being prioritized, Rosario said, has always been a concern. He said informally that he’ll be spending a lot of time in the neighborhood in the coming weeks.

“In my previous assignment, as far as resources go, I was never told no, because they knew if I was asking for it, we needed it,” Rosario said. “But we can always do better. And the Mayor… made it very clear to me, to the commissioner, that this has to change.”

Gilberto Gonzalez remembers the day a young man in the neighborhood who regularly cleaned up his block was robbed and beaten by people in addiction. The man put out a call-out to the neighbors, asking them to fill his void while he was recovering. And a large group of people, including Gonzalez, came out.

“We also were there to create a presence, like he’s not alone, we’re here with him,” Gonzalez said. “It’s insane the amount of needles we picked up. But also, there’s constantly people overdosing in the park while we were cleaning… and we would Narcan these people back to life.”

“We’re the ones doing the work, we’re the ones that walk block by block.”

“We’re the ones doing the work, we’re the ones that walk block by block, we’re the ones that actually risk our lives just going into the neighborhoods,” Gonzalez said.

That’s what Gonzalez wants Rosario to know as the deputy commissioner enters his new role overseeing Kensington: community members have been out daily, cleaning up mess after mess, while waiting for elected officials to follow through on their promises.

Community members, Gonzalez and others said, have to be included in the conversation as Rosario determines what his strategy will be — even if they disagree.

» READ MORE: After weekend shootings, Kensington community members are feeling afraid and fed up

There are a few priorities top of mind for Gonzalez: fixing needle distribution so there are fewer needles on the streets, engaging youths to stay in school instead of dealing drugs on the streets, making parks safe places. There are also some don’ts: moving people in addiction to certain neighborhoods, for example, is not a solution, and neither is simply arresting drug dealers, Gonzalez said. He suggested that they could be rerouted back to school instead.

But for many community members, the Police Department seems powerless when it comes to many of their concerns; how will they be able to curtail the root causes of crime on their own?

For Gonzalez, the idea that one person will make everything better is nonsense.

“Because that’s just one part of this huge problem,” Gonzalez said. “The police have their lane they can work in, but if all the other lanes aren’t working, then [the police are] working in a vacuum and nothing’s going to get better.”

It’s a fact that Rosario says he’s intimately aware of. During his time as a captain in the East Division, he regularly collaborated with other city departments such as sanitation or housing. As deputy commissioner, he said, he wants to amplify those existing relationships.

“We’re going to try to ramp up our service portion of our response to make sure that we’re having social services go out with our officers… to assist them in improving the quality of their life,” Rosario said.

In the nearly five decades that Israel Colón has lived in Kensington, he’s seen numerous iterations of the same “over-policing” strategy.

“It wasn’t stop-and-frisk, it was stop-and-strip,” Colón said, noting such strategies have always been ineffective at preventing crime in the neighborhood.

Rosario said there will be zero tolerance when it comes to enforcing the law on the open-air drug market.

“The citizens of the city, they want their police officers out there to make sure that their quality of life is something meaningful,” Rosario said.

On the other hand, he stressed, homelessness is not a crime, and he plans to address it with social services.

“If he has earned the respect and trust of some of those community folks, that’s a great step forward.”

While Colón doesn’t know Rosario, he’s heard good things about the new deputy commissioner from community members: a hopeful sign.

“If he has earned the respect and trust of some of those community folks, that’s a great step forward because he can do other things that are not typically considered law enforcement,” he said.

“He can galvanize and bring together all sorts of either services, institutional groups, neighborhood groups, in order to develop a comprehensive strategy that’s very neighborhood-focused.”

But too often, Colón said, community groups’ inputs are not taken as seriously as they should be.

That, residents said, would have to change under Rosario’s leadership in order to see effective change in Kensington.