Keeping other neighborhoods from becoming the new Allied
0:37 AM 4/21/04
Dean Mosiman and Andy Hall Wisconsin State Journal

If it gets too hot for criminals on Allied Drive, where do they go? <

Officials are trying to better identify and address the scattered poverty pockets most at risk of the trouble that besets Allied Drive. <

In his first budget, Mayor Dave Cieslewicz directed $125,000 at this goal, a small sum but recognition the city can't wait, he said. <

Madison police recently reorganized to emphasize community policing, so officers can more easily address neighborhood problems. <

A neighborhood can slide into trouble in just months, said Ron Chance, who oversees the county's Joining Forces for Families program, which delivers social services to stressed areas, often the same places where neighborhood police officers are deployed. <

Several spots in Dane County need attention now, Chance and others said. <

The Hammersley Road-Bettys Lane-Theresa Terrace-Elver Park area recently saw a boom in tenants using federal Section 8 housing assistance and on probation or parole. With that came crime. <

A neighborhood around Leopold School and South Fish Hatchery Road at the Madison and Fitchburg border is drawing poor and undocumented Latinos, who sometimes don't connect with neighbors or with health-care and other services. <

For now, Hammersley Road-Elver Park is getting the most attention. <

The Southwest Neighborhood Resource Team, one of several teams representing the city, county, schools and others, got concerned about racial tensions, crime and other problems around Hammersley Road and produced a report in August 2002. <

Police calls rose 45 percent from 1996 to 2001 in the core neighborhood, and suspensions at Falk Elementary School jumped 95 percent from 1997-98 to 1999-00, the report showed. <

So police deployed a neighborhood officer in January 2003, and Joining Forces for Families opened an office last fall. <

The neighborhood officer, Curtis Fields, is already pushing out drug dealers and helping brighten the night in the area of low-rent duplexes and middle-class single-family homes. A grateful resident sent him a thank-you card after he drove away a suspected drug dealer by persuading the landlord not to renew the lease. "The bottom line is, landlords are the gatekeepers," Fields said. <

Fields estimates drug deals - those in the open, anyway - were slashed dramatically. "Hammersley is my neighborhood," he tells suspected criminals. "You are only here because I'm letting you here." <

But troublemakers remain free to cause chaos elsewhere. <

"All we're doing is displacing it, but that is the only solution we are given," Fields said. "We can't rehabilitate or turn people around." <

Deeper change is maddeningly slow, Fields said. <

Only 20 of 140 openings for children to go to swimming, day camps and bicycling outside the Hammersley Road neighborhood were used last summer. <

And it took a strong neighborhood association and two City Council members just to brighten a street corner. <

"After eight months, one streetlight," he lamented. <

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