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Did Outsiders Make 911 Calls? A Fear Born of Brooklyn Gentrification

NEW YORK — Late Friday afternoon, on the roofs of the four low-rise, brick buildings that sit at the intersection of Utica Avenue and Montgomery Street in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, in New York, pairs of police officers were monitoring the block where, two days earlier, four of their colleagues had shot 10 bullets at a 34-year-old black man, Saheed Vassell, killing him.

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Did Outsiders Make 911 Calls? A Fear Born of Brooklyn Gentrification
By
GINIA BELLAFANTE
, New York Times

NEW YORK — Late Friday afternoon, on the roofs of the four low-rise, brick buildings that sit at the intersection of Utica Avenue and Montgomery Street in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, in New York, pairs of police officers were monitoring the block where, two days earlier, four of their colleagues had shot 10 bullets at a 34-year-old black man, Saheed Vassell, killing him.

What or whom they were protecting was not entirely obvious. Below them, the streetscape was absent any sense of chaos — a makeshift memorial had grown in front of a bodega, a handful of young people were drinking and talking on a stoop across the street, rolling joints.

The police had responded, on Wednesday, to a trio of 911 calls reporting that a man was wielding what looked like a silver gun and threatening people with it. What appeared to be a firearm was, in fact, a metal pipe with a knob, and the man who looked as if he might be a dangerous assailant turned out to be someone well known locally, a welder and a father who suffered from bipolar disorder; a frequent, harmless presence on the streets.

It was not long before a belief took hold in the community that the people who had alerted the police to Vassell’s erratic behavior were surely outsiders — new arrivals who had become synonymous with the Crown Heights of untenable rents and contrived adventures in millennial night life (take for example Butter & Scotch, a bar and bakery that ennobles the protracted childhood, serving a vodka martini and a hot fudge sundae as a pairing and funneling one dollar from every cocktail to Planned Parenthood).

At least one of the 911 callers was later revealed to be someone working in a neighborhood laundromat, but it was irrelevant to the residents’ fear over who had alerted the police. The notion that the invaders, afraid of what they did not know, were surely responsible, exemplified the growing terror around gentrification circulating in central Brooklyn, which is experiencing one of the most acute housing crises in the country.

Adem Bunkeddeko, a young son of Ugandan immigrants who is running for Congress in the district encompassing Crown Heights, on a platform almost entirely centered on the issue of affordable housing, had heard the speculation, often delivered with certainty, from people in the community. Like the corner of Utica and Montgomery, the site of his campaign office, several blocks away on Troy Avenue, is far from the section of Crown Heights that has so visibly changed.

East of Albany Avenue there are few clear markers of the high life, but the apartments there were beginning to go to the young and affluent, he said. I asked him about a building visible from his headquarters and under renovation. “I don’t know,” he said, “but it’s not for anyone from around here.”

He remarked at how often he hears French when he walks around the district, the result of so many European tourists making a thing out of Airbnb rentals in Crown Heights.

Middle-aged couples from the Marais or recent graduates of Middlebury would have known nothing of Vassell, his eccentricities and patterns, the thinking goes. “It has been this popular refrain that it’s not one of us who called,” Candace Simpson, a young minister at the 171-year-old Concord Baptist Church of Christ, told me. “That’s a lament. That is people saying, ‘What do we do when a community isn’t full of neighbors anymore?'” She was speaking as someone who had spent her life in Brooklyn, in Crown Heights for a while and more recently in Bedford-Stuyvesant.

When she heard about the shooting, she thought about her first apartment in Bed-Stuy and a man on her block who had cognitive processing difficulties. “Sometimes he would walk up and hug people and he was very strong,'’ she said. “The first time it happened to me I was startled.”

She came to see that this was just something he did, that he was friendly and no danger to anyone. She had been thinking about what had become of him, or would, at a time when the entire demographic of that block had changed so dramatically.

“We know intimately that when white people show up, when people with money show up, there is an investment made” in the neighborhood, Simpson said. Police officers, for instance, will begin appearing in train stations. In the end, as she put it, “it’s a fishing expedition.”

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