Creating a safe community requires building trusting relationships. That means relationships among neighbors and also between police officers and the residents they serve.
That’s the message police gave Fairfax residents at a Neighborhood Conversations meeting Thursday at Meijer’s Fairfax Market at Cedar Avenue and East 105th Street.
At the meeting, Cleveland officers with the Third District, Malcom Sutton-Nicholson and Roger Jones, along with Ashley Connole with the Cleveland Clinic Police Department, answered residents’ questions and offered advice on how to help keep their neighborhood safe.
Sutton-Nicholson grew up in Fairfax. He and Jones are community engagement officers tasked with getting to know neighbors and attending community events like the community conversation on Thursday.
Sutton-Nicholson advised Fairfax residents to “become a community again,” to start block clubs and get to know their neighbors.
“It’s really hard to commit crimes when you got a close-knit community where you know everybody will report all the wrongdoing,” he said.
‘We should virtually have no crime’
Dionne Thomas Carmichael is a lifelong Fairfax resident. She said after learning how many police officers cover the area in and around Fairfax — including from the Cleveland, Cleveland Clinic, University Circle and Transit Police departments — she doesn’t understand why her neighborhood isn’t one of the safest in Cleveland.
“With so many extra police paying attention to our area, we should virtually have no crime,” she told Signal Cleveland. “The area should be a model area. And oftentimes, I don’t see that.”
Carmichael told police they should slow down and talk to neighbors instead of quickly driving through the neighborhood. She said she would like to see a more “symbiotic” relationship, with police keeping residents safe and residents supporting the police.
Jones encouraged residents to report crimes as they see them if they want to see more police patrolling their neighborhoods.
“Law enforcement is a reactionary profession, just by the nature of it,” Jones said. “We try to be proactive, but if someone wants to throw a brick through a window, it’s kind of hard to predict that.”
He said the police department deploys more officers to certain areas based on crime statistics.
“So that old saying, ‘the squeaky wheel gets the grease,’” he said. “That’s it right there.”
Fostering community connections
Thursday’s meeting was the third Neighborhood Conversations meeting the Fairfax Renaissance Development Corp. has hosted in partnership with Meijer’s Fairfax Market.
Jesse DismukEs, neighborhood services coordinator for the development corporation, said the goal of the meetings is to bring neighbors and business owners together to connect and promote a safer community.
It’s also a way for “legacy residents” like Thomas Carmichael to get to know new neighbors as the community keeps adding housing developments and businesses.
The first meeting in April focused on the history of the neighborhood and where the name Fairfax came from – Florence Bundy Fairfax, a College for Women of Western Reserve University graduate in the 1920s who served as the superintendent of the Bureau of Recreation Centers in the 1940s.
At that first meeting, residents said they wanted to talk about economic development, safety, arts and culture and community amenities, DismukEs said.
“I’m glad that residents were able to voice their concerns,” he said. “To be able to connect with their safety officers in a way that they may not be able to any other time.”
