South Bronx Teens Put Safety On The Map With Crime Website

SOUTH BRONX, NY — Joshua McCutchen regularly sees homeless people hanging around shops and housing projects in Soundview, the South Bronx neighborhood where he lives. At first he wasn't sure how to help.

"It would make me feel kind of bad and sad at the same moment because all of them had no family, no food, nothing to do because they had no job," said McCutchen, 14, an eighth grader at PS/MS 95.

That wasn't all McCutchen and his friends who attend the Sonia Sotomayor Community Center on Rosedale Ave. would see when they were out and about. Sometimes they noticed people selling drugs or walked past abandoned construction sites that have long stood empty.

In September 2016, the two dozen students in the community center's Bulldogs youth program created a map to track these problems. On it they plot crimes and social issues that they see themselves and others that have been reported to them by community members.

Every month, they share what they collect with Bronx Community Board 9 and the NYPD's 43rd Precinct, said Yeremi Rosario, a program coordinator who oversees the Bulldogs for Phipps Neighborhoods, which runs the community center.

The project, dubbed Community Watch, started as a paper map on a wall with a $250 budget. But, by December, it will be a website with an interactive map where neighbors can submit tips anonymously.

"It’s allowing them to learn how to advocate for themselves and about issues that are really happening in their community," Rosario said.

The website, which the teens are working in teams to build themselves, is funded by a $2,000 award the Bulldogs won in July at the Allstate Foundation's Good Starts Young Rally, a nationwide competition for youth groups. McCutchen and two other Bulldogs participated in workshops there that helped their project grow.

The Community Watch map has color-coded points showing where different kinds of crimes, suspicious activity or social problems have been seen. Possible drug-dealing has one color, for example, while sightings of homeless people have another.

That's helped point the NYPD to trouble spots in the South Bronx neighborhood, which is covered by the 43rd Precinct. That precinct has seen 1,711 crimes so far this year, a 14 percent drop from 2016.

“All the poverty and all the gang activity can lower down — not as fast as we think it would, but it will lower down sooner or later,” said Tyrell Wright, 13, who's helping build the Community Watch site.

Building the site is giving McCutchen and some other Bulldogs their first experience with coding, giving them a leg up as they move into high school and college, Rosario said. White said he's created a website before, but professional coders are helping him and the group wade through this more complex project.

The Bulldogs plan to tell other community centers about the map to encourage people throughout the neighborhood to use it. They hope to expand it to cover all of the Bronx.

"Most people are online, so maybe more people will find it and understand the good of it," McCutchen said.

(Lead image: Three members of the Bulldogs, a youth program at the Sonia Sotomayor Community Center in the South Bronx, went to Chicago this summer and won funding for Community Watch, their online crime reporting project. Photo courtesy of Phipps Neighborhoods/Sonia Sotomayor Community Center)