Police response makes a difference in West Broadway

When Winnipeg police executed a major drug bust in West Broadway at the end of July, the effects were immediately felt in the neighbourhood, but not in the form of an immediate sense of calm. Instead, it was like someone had kicked a wasp nest. We’d been watching and feeling the social decay in the area accelerate over the spring and summer. For me, the day after the bust began with a group of drunken men lolling about on my front lawn, talking and laughing loudly enough to wake us up at 7 a.m.

Later, I found myself calling 911 not once, but twice. First to report an in-progress assault of a man beating a woman with a heavy pipe on Sherbrook Street and then to report someone lying motionless across the sidewalk on Furby Street. These 911 calls were made in the middle of a bright and sunny weekend. That day, we’d made plans for a backyard potluck with some neighbours. The Sherbrook assault happened on my way to FoodFare to pick up some extra potatoes. I encountered the man on the sidewalk when I went to retrieve my children from the park at the end of the street. Such is life in the inner city.

The intensity of unrest during the summer was such that, for the first time in 18 years, we seriously considered moving out of the neighbourhood. We visited a few houses in adjacent neighbourhoods and laughed about how living a block off of Portage Avenue in the West End would still be eerily quiet for someone used to inner-city action. We joked about moving into a house along a flight path to the airport. Airplanes overhead every 10 minutes? As innocuous as the singing of birds for these tenacious Winnipeggers.

In a search for meaning, I sought out Peter Moskos’s book Back from the Brink, about the crime turnaround in New York City in the 1980s and ’90s. The book is structured as a series of interviews and testimonials from New York Police Department personnel and follows a through-line of increased accountability and professionalization of the police force. To turn New York around, the police took back transit, targeted petty crime, built community connections, and strategically tailored responses and plans to individual neighbourhoods. My reading of the book coincided with our own police chief’s announcements about increased transit enforcement, the ending of “gravy train” retail-overtime shifts, and targeting of known gang and mob members in licensed establishments. It’s enough to raise a West Broadway eyebrow in interest.

I put down the real-estate listings and noticed some new patterns in the neighbourhood. West Broadway had settled back to its precarious pre-summer baseline, and I found myself encouraged by the changes I’ve seen. The nights are a bit raucous, and we still need to be hyper-aware of the people with whom we share the streets, but the crowds of intoxication, the health emergencies, the shouted threats and the desperation seem to have eased up.

And the police feel more present. We seem to be within their gaze more than we’ve ever experienced. When my neighbour found an improvised weapon in his flower bed, the police responded and collected it the next day. When my husband’s bike was stolen from our garage, a detective phoned him weeks later to let him know they were still looking for it. Even the man beating the woman with the pipe on Sherbrook was spread over the hood of a police cruiser and the woman was receiving medical care by the time I returned with my potatoes.

These are not the responses we’re accustomed to getting from police in West Broadway. Despite the initial spasms of unrest due to the police crackdown, it seems the sustained grip of law enforcement on the neighbourhood is having an effect. Back from the Brink emphasizes the need for a police force to hold the line at every level of crime, to think creatively, to collect and utilize data that’s useful. Winnipeg seems to now have a police chief who has done his reading, and it’s making a real difference in the inner city.

rebecca.chambers@freepress.mb.ca