Some residents living near the Riverside Apartments on Olson Drive fear that the problems that have plagued that spot for years are moving closer too home and too close for comfort.
“Some of my neighbors are scared to come outside,” Alderman Robert Beall recently told the Board of Aldermen about his fourth-ward constituents.
The fear, he said, is that the criminal activity that has marked the apartments is spreading into other neighborhoods. There has been increased reports of things like drug activity taking place on city streets such as Howard Avenue, Arch Street and Grove Street, he said.
“It seems like it’s moving up from Olson Drive,” he said.
Last November, Jamar Perry, 28, was arrested for allegedly shooting a Riverside Apartment resident in the leg in his home. The victim survived.
That was not the case several months earlier when Perry’s sister Tiffany, 27, allegedly stabbed to death Jennifer Lewis, 22, on one of the apartment’s balcony. Tiffany Perry is facing murder charges and has been in custody since her arrest on $750,000 bond.
And police are still investigating the shooting death of Bernice McFadden, 39, at the apartments last July. That investigation is still “very much active,” Police Chief Kevin Hale said Monday.
Mayor James Della Volpe has worked for the past several years to get funding to demolish the buildings and relocate the residents and integrate them into the community. Two of the buildings were taken down last fall and the rest will come down as funding becomes available.
Plans call for the project to be replaced with townhouses.
Beall asked Hale to consider expanding the department’s special patrols to the streets in his ward that lead to the apartments, saying that the increase in criminal activity there is affecting the resident’s quality of life.
“We have seen an uptick in incidences,” Hale said, including a recent rash of car break-ins city-wide.
But there’s no hard evidence yet of an increase in crime specifically in that area of the fourth ward, Hale said.
“We don’t have anything to back up the perception that crime is moving in that direction,” he said, but officers are aware of Beall’s concerns and will be paying more attention to the area.
And the block watch formed in that area is another good tool in fighting an increase in crime, he said. “They have a well-organized watch there,” he said.
And as far as the Riverside Apartments are concerned, the summer has been “non-eventful,” Hale said.
