Youngstown Safety Summit espouses collaboration

January 8, 2012 at 12:09a.m.

By ELISE McKEOWN SKOLNICK

YOUNGSTOWN

Collaboration was the word heard over and over again at a safety summit that took place on the city’s South Side.

Various law-enforcement agencies and community members came together Saturday to discuss ways to combat crime and get criminals off the street.

The event at St. Dominic Church was meant to bring together neighborhood block-watch members and law-enforcement officials to help facilitate communication among the groups and to talk about specifics of crimes, said Jon M. Holloway, head of the Mahoning Valley Violent Crimes Task Force and FBI supervisory special agent

The FBI is an organization focused on long-term investigations, Holloway noted.

“And that’s probably what we do best, but if you do that and five more gangs come along while you’re doing that, you’re really just treading water, at best,” he said.

So they’re working on a strategy to address issues in the short-term, rather than only focusing on lengthy investigations.

“We’ll try to do something today, and we need” community members, Holloway said. “We need them as much as they need law enforcement because we can’t be on the street 24/7. We have to partner more with the community to determine where the real threats are that we need to address.”

Collaboration has been long in coming, said 7th Ward Councilman John R. Swierz.

“Now they’re showing that they want to go down to the level where they have trust in the residents in the neighborhoods,” he said. “So then the residents have to step forward and realize that there is some risk. However, the benefits outweigh the risks.”

David Toepfer, a federal prosecutor, agreed.

“I understand fear,” he told attendees. “But the bad guys in a community are more afraid of you than you are of them. They are cowards.”

Rose Wilkins, an East Side resident, attended the summit to find out what can be done about crime in her neighborhood.

“It just seems like it’s accelerating,” she said.

She said events such as Saturday’s summit need to be in a more central location, such as downtown.

“People on the East Side are getting kind of disgusted because they figure that everything goes on on the North Side and the South Side,” Wilkins said. “They never have a meeting over there on the East Side. We have to come over here.”

The Brownlee Woods area, on the eastern edge of the city’s South Side, hasn’t had any serious incidents, said Nancy Martin, president of the neighborhood association there.

But she attended the event to learn what plans the police have for tackling crime in the city, and to work with them to prevent crime.

“I think that neighborhood organizations have done a wonderful job of turning in what they see,” she said. “When they see something happen, they do call the police.”