Most Common Crime in Downtown Is Illegal Parking
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio -- For the Downtown Business Alliance of Youngstown, better known as DBAY, the grind begins – committee work.
At Tuesday night’s meeting, Sharon Letson, executive director of Youngstown CityScape, of which DBAY is a component, asked for members to sit on the committees of their choice and begin the work of assessing how to effect DBAY goals: creating a safe attractive environment that will aid in business retention and attraction and strengthen communications between the downtown business community and city government.
“The issue used to be, how do we get people to come downtown?” Letson said. “Now it’s how do we manage them?” That is, their behavior after dark when they leave bars, and where they illegally park.
The issue of illegal parking and the litter visitors create prompted considerable comment among the 15 or so who sat around the table in the Regional Chamber boardroom on the 17th floor of National City Tower. A merchant on the first floor of 20 Federal Place asked the two policemen who spoke, patrolmen William Burton and Michael Cox, how much revenue the city was generating from having scofflaws pay their fines before the city would release their cars that were towed away.
One scofflaw had run up $6,000 in fines, Burton replied. He called a tow truck after calling the clerk of courts office to learn how many tickets that car had been issued.
“The hardest thing since the downtown has been revitalized is getting [scofflaws] to realize they can’t park illegally anymore,” Burton told DBAY.
Officers who work weekends and on the afternoon and midnight shifts are hampered by the clerk of court’s office being open only 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. weekdays. “That’s the only time you can get information on illegally parked cars,” he said. He praised the clerk’s staff for its cooperation but unless something is done to make ticket violation information available after 4 p.m., patrolmen can do little beyond issue another ticket.
Could a file of scofflaws be created, he wondered aloud, that patrolmen could access 24/7 so they could call a tow truck when someone has been issued a sizeable number. City ordinances allow a tow truck to be summoned to remove an illegally parked car than has as few as three unpaid tickets.
Also discussed was the return of uniformed patrolmen walking a beat downtown during the afternoon shift. When Youngstown had a larger population and more merchants were downtown, Cox said, “Six policemen patrolled the downtown.”
The return of the bars in the arts and entertainment district would suggest having at least one patrolman walk the downtown as his beat, Cox observed. Burton also advocated having a foot patrol but noted funding is scare and the policemen who do patrol the downtown are often summoned to matters elsewhere in the city.
They also released maps of the downtown and a half-mile radius that showed “hot spots,” that is, where police were summoned to investigate reported crimes.
From April 15 to June 14, no crime was reported in most of the downtown and “very low” incidents of crime were reported in a circle drawn over South Champion and South Phelps streets between East Boardman and Federal streets.
Between June 15 and July 14, that same area in the downtown was “low” surrounded by “very low” that extended to East Commerce Street. Again, no crimes were reported in the remainder of the downtown.
From July 15 to Aug. 18, the area in question shifted west and a figure 8 of low crime emerged. Inside the “low” circles of the 8 was the figure 8 itself, “very low.”
Between Aug. 19 and Sept. 16, the area changed its shape to three concentric circles, the innermost label “medium, the second “low” and the outermost “very low” in an otherwise no-crime downtown.
Copyright 2013 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
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