By Damien Cave, The New York Times
NEWARK, N.J. - Mayor Sharpe James, responding to mounting criticism after eight killings here since Thanksgiving, convened an anti-violence summit on Thursday and announced a plan to add 80 police officers and seven neighborhood precincts in 2005.
He said the new precincts, along with four current ones, would encompass not just police officers but also city workers from the Fire Department, Health Department and other city agencies.
“We will bring services to the neighborhoods,” Mr. James said at the three-hour meeting at Police Headquarters on Washington Street. “We want the police, the city and community to work together.”
Newark’s police director, Anthony Ambrose, said that it would cost the city about $8 million to hire and train the officers over the next six months. He added that the locations and costs of the new station houses had not been determined.
The mayor said that money for the plan would come out of the 2005 city budget. The extra police presence, he said, had been in the works for months and was not a response to the recent violence. So far this year in Newark, a city of 270,000, there have been 85 murders, including a killing at the Essex County jail. Forty-five of them are unsolved. There were 83 murders in 2003; 68 in 2002.
Still, the mayor said, overall crime is down, and Newark’s murder rate has not outpaced the rates of similar-size cities like Birmingham, Ala.
“Newark is not the murder capital of New Jersey or America,” he said.
Some at the summit found the statistics more alarming. As an example of violence run amok, they cited the discovery, on the day after Thanksgiving, of four bodies, shot execution style, in an empty lot beside a church in the South Ward.
“Our citizens are justly outraged,” said Paula T. Dow, the acting Essex County prosecutor. “We have to do something about it.”
Citizens’ fears, she said, have become a major hurdle to prosecution. “Our witnesses are being threatened, our witnesses are being coerced, and they’re being killed,” Ms. Dow said. “We have got to do something more collectively to say we will not tolerate this anymore, that we will stand up for what’s right.”
Several other speakers from community groups and churches addressed what they said were the root causes of urban violence: Some demanded more jobs and after-school programs for youths; some called on parents, teachers and federal officials to spend more time reaching out to young people and fighting the low expectations that they said American culture often applies to black men and women.
Others criticized the summit’s focus on talk, rather than action.
“We’re doing our job, but we need your help,” said Kevin Tate, 34, president of Saving Our Selves, a group of street gang members who renounced violence last May and have been working toward a truce between the Bloods and the Crips. “Stop sitting in your office and come to the neighborhood. Take off your ties and come see what we’re doing.”