If there’s one thing Canarsiens want, it’s some peace and quiet.
Residents living near Canarsie Park — which appears to have been party central all summer — are both tired of noise and angry that so little has been done to contain it, if those who spoke at a recent community meeting are any indication.
Indeed, the dissatisfaction boiled over at the September meeting of the United Canarsie South Civic Association (UCSCA), with residents vocally objecting to the level of noise at parties in the park and in private homes, and also complaining about what they consider to be the lack of attention being paid to the problem.
Speaking to the group gathered in the auditorium at the Hebrew Educational Society, 9502 Seaview Avenue, one woman who lives across the from the park noted, “A lot of people are complaining about what’s going on. The laws are as good as they are enforced. The 69th Precinct doesn’t come out to stop loud parties and loitering after dark. I’ve lived in the neighborhood for 12 years, and there’s a big problem here. We can’t get rest on weekdays or weekends. There are homeowners who have parties with sound so loud it should be in a club. It happens all the time, and everyone continues to come in because they see the other parties going on. It doesn’t help when you have to go to work and you hear people in the park, frolicking and blasting music.”
Another woman attending the meeting concurred. “There are millions of parties in the park every weekend,” she remarked, noting that she had stopped calling 311 because her complaints so often went unresolved.
Neal Duncan, UCSCA’s president, said that he had heard a lot of complaints about the noise. “Everybody and his neighbor have been having parties, and they’re all trying to blast each other out of the universe,” he remarked.
To counter this, the precinct doesn’t issue any sound permits, said Sergeant Newell Laird, of the 69th Precinct’s community affairs unit. If someone is blasting music in the park, he added, “I tell the cops that go there, that’s automatically a summons or your stuff gets confiscated, because you don’t have a sound permit.”
In addition, he said, “We have a cop assigned to the 311 system, so once you call 311, we have cops in the field, all they do is shut down parties. For one person having a party, we can’t let 10 other people on the block suffer. We used to try to give warnings, but when we leave, what happens? They turn it back up. So, now, when we come back, the DJ gets the ticket and we’re taking the equipment.
“On any given night, especially on the weekend,” Laird went on, “we shut down an average of 10 to 15 parties.
“I’m going to help you,” he told the women.
The level of police response has a great deal to do with staffing levels, said City Councilmember Lewis Fidler. “You can’t fault the 69th Precinct if it takes them three hours to get to a loud party because they don’t have the appropriate level of personnel,” he told the group, stressing that, citywide, police ranks have been thinned, something he called a “huge mistake.
Indeed, the total number of police officers in the city, “Is about to drop below the police force we had on 9/11,” Fidler stressed. This means, he added, that, “The things that make us nuts, and make it more difficult for us to stay in our community, get put on the back burner.”
Assemblymember Alan Maisel agreed. Noting that the precinct has a maximum of four or five cars on the streets during the 4 p.m. to midnight tour, he said, “If you get one serious situation, you can get two to three cars there. This can’t be. If the middle class leave (the city), we are back to the 1970s, and that would be a disaster.”
There a couple of strategies that residents can try, Duncan said. For one thing, he told the group, they should continue to complain, as members of UCSCA. “Everyone should be calling,” he said. “There’s strength in numbers.”
Another approach, Duncan added, is getting to know your neighbors. “If your neighbor knows you to the point where he knows your name and says hello, he will be a little concerned to turn up the music, knowing he will have to see you the next day,” Duncan stressed.
