Meeting Summary
August 3, 2011
Present: Isaac Crapps, Ed Kelly, Walter Kroll, Ceil Lewonchuk, Tricia Love-Walsh, Michael McLaurin, Cathy
Paquin, Charlie Ramos, Paul Swenson, Stephen Thibeau.
Bowdoin Street Watch
Walks:
Ed Kelly, Paul Swenson, Walter Kroll and Charlie Ramos
conducted a Watch Walk on Bowdoin St. on July 28th to establish a
presence there. There have been some
fires on Bowdoin St. and the neighbors there are very concerned. A meeting was held recently with the Arson
Squad, which was well attended. The
fires are still under investigation. The
Watch Walks will continue in August at two week intervals. The next one will be on Thursday, August 11
from 7:00 – 8/8:30 and everyone is invited to participate. We need to get Valerie Paul, who is the block
captain for Bowdoin St., as well as the Police Dept. involved in this activity.
Miscellaneous
Updates:
Charlie has a volunteer available to
do neighborhood watch related work. This
person has been making some phone calls to people in the neighborhood to try
and raise awareness. If there is any
other work that this person could do, please contact Charlie to make
arrangements. Charlie will have another
informational leaflet printed up with emergency phone numbers. He also gave a brief explanation about how
Text-a-Tip works.
Steve Thibeau reported that he
followed up on a recent suggestion concerning the use of emergency restraining
orders.
Neighborhood Crime
Statistics:
Charlie reported that Eastern Ave.
has been a “hot spot” recently for gang related crime. A suggestion was made to publish gang
members' photos as tatoos could easily be used for identification
purposes. Someone from the PD should
talk to our group about gang-related crime in more depth. There was general discussion about gang crime
involving the trafficking of illegal guns.
A lot of minors are involved in this activity. There have been some arrests made in northern
MA recently for guns coming in to the state from VT.
Home Security:
Charlie
can arrange to have someone conduct a home security review at minimal
cost. Anyone interested should contact
him. The group discussed some security
issues with locks, windows and window air conditioning units and Charlie had
brochures available on keypad locks.
Motion lighting and some easy precautions like not leaving tools around
outside were also mentioned. There was
also some discussion from attendees about recent break-ins and suspicious
behavior. Some problems with police
responsiveness were also cited.
