Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson ordered a community forum Thursday night to discuss the most popular act of vandalism in West Park history.
At issue was the future of a lone basketball court at the center of sprawling Impett Park, which is surrounded by dozens of homes. Last spring, the court’s heavy-duty hoops were mangled in the dead of night and later removed, with damages estimated at $14,000. Police interviewed neighbors, but made no arrests.
This article appears in Nov 17-23, 2010.
They only cost $14,000 if you replace them. While I don’t condone vandalism or lawlessness if the city had listened to the residents for the last few years they would not have been torn down, they would have been taken down properly. You can be sure that if those hoops were still standing that meeting would never have happened.
Cox also stated that these problems are at every hoop in the city, which tells me there are no proven solutions. The city doesn’t have the resources to police personal behavior. Hoops belong at rec centers where there is supervision and staff. That deters people with less than good intentions and creates an environment where “youth” can play safely. The stats that should have been given were “calls for service” which is much different than stats of assaults and felonies. The issues aren’t always criminal, sometimes they’re just quality of life.
The author implies that this is a race issue. It isn’t. The courts are used by a variety of mosly young men of all races. The behavior and the language is bad…so is the basketball, for that matter. The perpetrators are probably majority white with a fair number of hispanics and blacks. But the issue is behavior. We live in a culture where citizens are reluctant to get into someone’s face and tell them to behave. So we have a stand-off…the residents, middle class, with small children, using the playground; and, the players, typically from outside of the neighborhood, foul-mouthed and disrespectful.
While I condemn the vandalism (and the glee sometimes expressed by people in the neighborhood over the destruction), there is a choice here…a very nice, but shaky middle class Cleveland neighborhood (people who pay lots of taxes!), people who regularly ask themselves “should I move out?” vs. the young, profane and disrespectful basketball players. One has got to give. The city has neither the resources nor the interest in supervising behavior on the courts.
So, why can’t the neighborhood have what it wants? There is no “color barrier” on the swingsets, the jungle gym, the ball fields, or the tennis courts.