​Why Can’t New York City Keep Track of Crime in Public Parks?

On the morning of Thursday, October 16, a 50-year-old man named Alfedo Caracena-Camber was found lying face-up at Lozada Playground, a recreational area for children in the Bronx Projects. He had been stabbed multiple times in the head and chest. He was barely clinging to life when a jogger found him, and died in the ambulance.

If nothing else, one might assume Bronx residents could turn to their government to educate them on the safety of parks and playgrounds like this one. But the New York Police Department doesn't keep track of crimes there. In fact, the NYPD doesn't track crime in most of the thousands of parks in the city, tallying statistics for a mere 31 of them.

New York "wrote the book on data-driven crime fighting," as Mayor Bill de Blasio wrote himself back in 2012, when he was serving as public advocate, but the "dearth of statistics on crime in [its] parks is astounding." And it's not like they've just forgotten about it. The NYPD has been mandated for almost a decade to track crime in all parks one acre or greater via Local Law 114, which passed in 2005, but they've bullshitted around, pointing to a clause in the bill that made that mandate "subject to the availability of resources and the introduction of necessary technology." In the age of the iPhone, GPS, and constant surveillance (including of innocent Muslim citizens), the NYPD has continued to claim it doesn't have the technology to track crime in public spaces.

When a crime like the Padazo playground murder happens, "it won't go into a database earmarking that it happened inside a park," says Geoffrey Croft, director of the NYC Park Advocates, an organization that attempts to track crime in the city's parks and playgrounds. "Unless you had access to tens of thousands of criminal complaints a year, you would never know this type of activity was going on in the parks."

Joe Puleo, president of Parks Enforcement Union Local 983, thinks it's just a question of commitment. "I believe that they do have the resources [to track crime in parks]," he told me. "I just think that they're not motivated to do this—one, because it costs extra money, manpower, and two, if they were to start tracking crime in parks, it would reflect that there really is a problem out there."

Croft, for his part, repeatedly emphasized how "disgraceful" and "embarrassing" the city's approach to crime in parks is.

When faced with park crime, he told me, the city not only neglects to properly report it, but often takes inefficient measures to curb it. One of the city's approaches—used on Riverside Park, St. Mary's Park, and Marcus Garvey Park—is to simply to rip out all the benches in problem zones, which makes it unusable for everyone. "It's ridiculous," Croft said. "It's a horrific example of society failing. And giving over our open spaces to criminals."

Our conversation concerned one park in particular: Marcus Garvey Park, in Harlem. It has a hill known as the Acropolis, atop which sits the legendary Harlem Fire Watchtower. Over the years, the Acropolis has gathered a reputation as a criminal hangout, and it has been subsequently gutted of its lights and benches.

"It's disgraceful what they did. It means that you or I or the average person can't go up there and enjoy those views," Croft said. "They even put up that stupid chain-link fence around [the water tower]. So instead of fixing it, they put up the fence, which is actually more of a safety issue, because there's less room if you were in trouble up there. This is another example of how parks are abandoned to deal with crime." "See for yourself," Croft dared me. "Go up to the top of Marcus Garvey Park—not at night, of course—and physically look around."

I asked him what would happen if I went at night. "I don't recommend it," He said ominously. "That's just not safe."

Naturally, I took a subway uptown and arrived at the park after midnight, staring up the hill at the Acropolis. Even at the bottom, it was quiet and scary. Few people were around. I began to climb the monumental steps. As I climbed higher and higher, noises retreated into the shadows. Light began to fade. Soon it became so dark that I could barely see the steps in front of me. I pulled out my camera and took a picture, half-expecting to see some crazed ghoul in the frame. At one point, I realized that if I screamed up here, no one would be able to hear me.

Finally, I reached the top—a beautiful view, one of the best in the city, no doubt. I began to walk towards the watchtower, which was enclosed by the chain-link fence Croft told me about. All of a sudden, not three steps away, leaning against a wall, I saw the shadowy outline of a man. I froze.

The person started shuffling. I looked down, and realized the man had a hand on his exposed penis. The guy was masturbating.

He grunted and started to zip up his pants, declining to be interviewed. "You're not allowed to go there," he muttered over his shoulder, walking away.

I waited for the guy to disappear from sight, and promptly scaled the fence, dropping down the other side. The terror from that strange encounter suddenly began to settle in my chest. I quickly scaled the fence again, sprinted down the steps, my heart pounding, and made it to the bottom. I was safe.

For park-goers determined to avoid that kind of eerie experience, there does appear to be some light at the end of the tunnel. In February, the city passed a new bill requiring the tracking and disclosure of crimes in over 870 NYC parks by 2017, with stronger language than the 2005 legislation. Mark Levine, chair of the Parks Committee on the City Council, thinks the wait is almost over.

"I know that folks from the Council have been really anxious to get the reporting [from the recent bill] that was mandated," he told me, "and we're hopeful that it happens as soon as possible—the end of the year is what the administration is promising, but we feel some urgency here, for sure."

That's all well and good, but the NYPD, following in the tradition of its past mandates, already missed the first deadline for that bill, which required them to report crime in the city's 100 biggest parks by June 1. Once again, they hid behind technological issues and "computer problems." When I asked Levine about this, he said, "In the age of geocoding and GPS, there's no reason that we can't have precise location data on every crime, so I don't think there's a technological barrier here. I think it's probably been that they haven't had the bandwidth to pull it all together, but I really want to make sure it happens as soon as possible. It's critical information for the public to have. If we've learned one thing about fighting crime in the last couple decades, it's that having accurate data is essential."

The NYPD and mayor's office did not respond to my requests for comment.

Everyone—often depending on their size, gender, and skin color—has their own take on which parks are safe. But the NYPD owes it to the public to provide basic safety information about the parks, which are supposed to be peaceful respites from the intensity of everyday urban life.

"If people see that the playground that they go to has a large number of felony crimes that occurred there," Joe Puleo, the union president, said, "they might not want to go there anymore. But if it happens at night, then maybe the average person won't know that it happened and they would continue to go there. But ultimately, if we don't track it, it catches up to them, and then something explodes, and everyone says, 'Well, how come nobody said anything?' But it was building all along, and people just didn't want to acknowledge it."

Several officials, asking to speak off the record, stressed to me that the delay was an "issue," but that they had no idea why the NYPD wasn't moving faster. It's also worth noting that George Kelling, who coined the " broken windows" policing model embraced by the mayor and his police commissioner, Bill Bratton, has been brought on to help the city figure out park crime, among other things. Now we just need some transparency. It's been almost a decade in the making.

Follow Zach Schwartz on Twitter.