Ramshackle ENY Courthouse City's First NYPD-Led Community Center

EAST NEW YORK, BROOKLYN — A once rundown East New York courthouse will soon become the city's first NYPD-run community center after officials held a ribbon-cutting ceremony Wednesday.

The NYPD community center on Pennsylvania and Liberty avenues is slated to open next week as part of 2016's controversial East New York rezoning, officials said.

"This building ... was once a courtroom that was used to lock people up," East New York's City Council Member Rafael Espinal. "It’s a building that will be a space to strengthen our community and keep people out of jail."

The youth-focused center has a basketball court, music room, dance studio and computer lab, as well Brooklyn Community Board 5's headquarters.

The center will be open daily from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m., and host after school programing.

"This is how we keep our youth safe and out of the pipeline of the criminal justice system," Espinal said. "We need more of this in our City and I'm so proud that it has come to East New York."

Nilda Hofmann, the NYPD's chief of Community Affairs, said the "relationships that will be made" at the community center "will change lives for generations to come."

But not everyone is convinced the community center will forge bonds between cops and neighborhood residents.

Council Member Inez Barron, who also represents East New York, told the Brooklyn Eagle that while the new building is a "nice cosmetic fix," it won't tangibly change the relationship between East New York residents and police.

“The day-to-day interactions between NYPD and people in our community are less than stellar, less than what they might be in terms of the respect that needs to be accorded to the citizens that are here,” she told the Eagle.

"I think these are cosmetic fixes. I don’t think they get to the essence of what makes NYPD operate as it does.”