Neighborhood group makes an impact on Eastside crime

Story via Charlie Patton, The Florida Times-Union

When Janice Love was growing up, she considered Jacksonville’s Eastside neighborhood a fine place to live.

“It was thriving,” said Love, 62, co-chairwoman of the 2-year-old Eastside Neighborhood Association. “We could walk out our doors without locking them.”

But things went downhill in the neighborhood, which runs north from Jacksonville’s sports complex between Springfield and the St. Johns River.

So in 2007, FreshMinistries, an organization that had previously worked to improve economic opportunity in Springfield and in Durkeeville, decided to try a new initiative aimed at improving life on the Eastside.

“It was not a safe place,” said Robert V. Lee, founder, chairman and chief executive of FreshMinistries, who said he would see drug dealers operating openly on the streets as he drove through the neighborhood.

In the summer of 2007, FreshMinistries opened the East Jacksonville Neighborhood Resource Center at 1104 E. First Street, a couple of blocks from A. Philip Randolph Boulevard, which was once the neighborhood’s thriving central business district.

One of the first initiatives the resource center undertook was to create the Eastside Neighborhood Association.

“It used to be a close neighborhood,” said Michael Wicker, 49, who like Love has lived his whole life on the Eastside. “... We’re trying to reunite.”

Chris Butler, the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office’s assistant chief for Zone 1 covering the Eastside, called the creation of a neighborhood association “extremely important.”

“We can’t do our job without neighborhood involvement,” he said.

Two weeks ago, police officer Stephen Gallagher told a meeting of the neighborhood association that, for the year to date, violent crime in the neighborhood is down 34 percent and property crime is down 32 percent from 2008.

Beverly Toney, FreshMinistries’s liaison to the neighborhood association, said there have been a series of initiatives aimed at changing the neighborhood, all of which have contributed to a drop in crime.

Police have increased their visible presence in the neighborhood. A house at Phelps and Franklin streets, once notorious as a drug house, is now a police stop station. Sheriff John Rutherford has made four community walks with members of the neighborhood association.

“If the neighbors can see the officers walking with Miss Love, it makes them feel better about the police,” Toney said.

Other city agencies have helped as well, requiring property owners to bring buildings up to code, demolishing abandoned buildings and requiring residents to get rid of eyesores like junked cars.

Members of the neighborhood association also regularly organize neighborhood cleanups, Toney said.

“I want to be part of the solution,” said Dorian Baker, 25, who like Wicker is a community organizer for the neighborhood association. “We’ve definitely made progress. But we’ve got a long way to go .... we want to go leaps and bounds.”

Baker, who grew up in the neighborhood, said she blames her generation for allowing crime, apathy and despair to invade what was once a proud, close-knit community.

Others trace the neighborhood’s decline back much farther, to 1969, when long-simmering racial tensions exploded in a riot. It devastated a thriving business district along A. Philip Randolph Boulevard, then known as Florida Avenue.

Retail stores have all but disappeared from the neighborhood. Getting them back may be the biggest challenge the Eastside faces, Love said.

Most meetings of the Eastside Neighborhood Association attract 35 to 45 of the neighborhood’s 7,500 residents, Toney said. There have been as many as 60 people at some meetings.

This month’s meeting will be a Christmas party. The next business meeting of the association, which will take place at the resource center, will be Jan. 21 from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m.

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