{"id":1649325,"date":"2022-09-20T14:09:18","date_gmt":"2022-09-20T18:09:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1649325"},"modified":"2022-09-20T14:10:12","modified_gmt":"2022-09-20T18:10:12","slug":"park-slope-liberals-try-to-start-neighborhood-watch-hilarity-ensues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/park-slope-liberals-try-to-start-neighborhood-watch-hilarity-ensues\/","title":{"rendered":"Park Slope Liberals Try to Start Neighborhood Watch, Hilarity Ensues"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">20<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fpark-slope-liberals-try-to-start-neighborhood-watch-hilarity-ensues%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1649325&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div class=\"captioned-image-container\">\n<figure><a class=\"image-link is-viewable-img image2\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/substackcdn.com\/image\/fetch\/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep\/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7fe0d24f-d30d-486a-b13e-9c72cfa47d6b_3660x2326.jpeg\" rel=\"noopener\"><\/p>\n<div class=\"image2-inset\"><source type=\"image\/webp\" \/><img src width=\"1456\" height=\"925\" data-attrs=\"{\" \/><\/div>\n<p><\/a><figcaption class=\"image-caption\">(Paul Matzner via Alamy)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<p><span>In the last couple of months in Park Slope\u2014the baby bjorn-wearing capital of bourgeois-bohemian New York\u2014a thief absconded with $200,000 worth of jewelry in a <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/nypost.com\/2022\/08\/24\/crook-steals-in-200k-in-jewelry-in-nyc-smash-and-grab\/\" rel=\"\">smash and grab<\/a><span>, three boys <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/patch.com\/new-york\/parkslope\/phone-swiping-teens-sought-string-park-slope-train-robberies-pd\" rel=\"\">stole a bunch of iPhones<\/a><span> off of subway riders, a ticked off customer <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/patch.com\/new-york\/parkslope\/man-attacks-flatbush-avenue-bike-store-worker-steals-his-phone-nypd\" rel=\"\">attacked the owner of a bike store<\/a><span>, $6,000 was <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/patch.com\/new-york\/parkslope\/man-stole-6k-court-street-auto-shop-police-say\" rel=\"\">stolen from an auto shop<\/a><span>, and a beloved pet was <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.bkmag.com\/2022\/08\/08\/catnapped-boka-the-park-slope-bodega-cat-is-back-home\/\" rel=\"\">catnapped from a bodega<\/a><span> on Seventh Avenue.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>But it was the death of a golden retriever mix named Moose that activated the residents of the South Brooklyn enclave.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Early in the morning on August 3, Moose and his owner\u2014Jessica Chrustic, 41\u2014were out on a walk when a homeless man who lives in the park gave chase. He hit them both with a large stick and threw a container of urine on Moose, while muttering about immigrants taking over the park. The dog died a few days later from internal injuries, after two emergency surgeries. The man who killed him is still at large.<\/p>\n<p><span>A few weeks later, on August 20, Kristian Nammack issued a <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/nextdoor.com\/p\/-Ry4Q3XwnPMc?utm_source=share&amp;extras=NTIzMTc5NDg%3D\" rel=\"\">call to action on Nextdoor<\/a><span>, a social media site for local organizing: \u201cDo we want to organize a community safety patrol, and take our park back? Think what the Guardian Angels did to take back the subways in the 70s\/early 80s. We may also get to wear cool berets. I\u2019m being serious.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Nammack, 59, had been part of the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011, and his financial consultancy firm <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/narvnamm\/\" rel=\"\">focuses on<\/a><span> themes of \u201cclimate, renewable energy, gender lens, racial equity, economic advancement.\u201d \u201cHow about PARK SLOPE PANTHERS as a group name?\u201d he suggested.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>When I got to the inaugural Park Slope Panthers <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.meetup.com\/park-slope-panthers\/events\/288416899\/\" rel=\"\">meeting<\/a><span>\u2014held last Saturday in Prospect Park, near where Chrustic was attacked\u2014there were six people, including Nammack. We were overlooking a sloping meadow that was bathed in sunshine and filled with giggling kids and hipster couples on dates. It was one of those early fall days that reminds you why you\u2019re willing to live in a city with more rats than human beings. Nammack was handing out pale yellow t-shirts that said \u201cPark Slope Panthers\u201d with a logo\u2014two \u201cP\u201ds nested together\u2014printed on the front.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Nammack explained that while we were all there because of Moose, there were other things to be concerned about. It seemed like there were more homeless people sleeping in the park, in the subway station, and on the trains and streets. There was more garbage everywhere in the neighborhood, more crappy vape shops and stores that sold Delta-8 weed, and more delivery guys on bikes blasting faster through crosswalks. Packages, bikes, and catalytic converters were getting stolen. Nammack told the group how he\u2019d tried to help a local store owner while a group of 15-year-olds robbed his store. One of the teens had a knife.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The group\u2014a few older, white women who love their pets; a young white man who said he was there for the sake of his younger sister\u2019s safety; a forty-something Asian woman who wanted to \u201celevate Park Slope culture as a whole\u201d\u2014nodded along.<\/p>\n<p><span>The Venn diagram for Park Slopers and Democratic voters is pretty much a circle. No one wanted to be labeled <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.kqed.org\/arts\/13900749\/central-park-karen-amy-cooper-remains-unrepentant-about-central-park-karen-ing\" rel=\"\">Park Karens<\/a><span>. This made the whole crime-fighting thing a bit awkward: \u201cIt\u2019s about finding a way that\u2019s non-biased to report these things and have people feel like it\u2019s safe here,\u201d said Emily, one of the Panthers.\u201cYou don\u2019t want to fall into that stereotype of privilege.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>A group of four who looked to be in their early twenties\u2014three women and one man\u2014rolled up about 15 minutes into the meeting. \u201cAre y\u2019all the Park Slope Panthers?\u201d The one who asked was dragging a speaker on wheels and playing electronic music, presumably to drown out the meeting. \u201cWe are super not into you guys having your meeting or doing anything in the park.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The young activist\u2014who was white, wore glasses, grew up in Park Slope, and had a medical-grade face mask on, like his three comrades\u2014was also super not into the cops, or anything resembling the cops. When Nammack told him we were taking turns introducing ourselves, the activist informed Nammack that he wasn\u2019t \u201csuper into abiding by the structure that you\u2019re setting up.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Nammack asked them to just move along. When the glasses kid replied, \u201cYeah, we\u2019re not going to do that,\u201d Nammack invited them to sit, prompting the group of Conscientious Interrupters to decamp to a nearby tree to game plan. The park was filling. There were barbecues and birthday parties underway. Eventually the young activists decided to join the circle.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhat\u2019s with you calling yourself the Panthers?\u201d said another dude who had just appeared wearing a black hoodie and looking to be in his forties. He seemed more of a weathered activist, a bit more hardcore than the kids, and he didn\u2019t want to wait his turn. He said his piece, followed by another newcomer named Damien, who wanted to join the group rather than protest it.<\/p>\n<p>Nammack picked up the thread again. Back during the Occupy Wall Street days, he informed us, they took turns speaking. \u201cI think it\u2019s your turn, then your turn, then your turn, then your turn, then your turn,\u201d he said. When it was his turn to introduce himself, Nammack said, \u201cI have a non-profit and two companies. I\u2019m too busy to run a neighborhood watch group, but I can\u2019t help but be community-concerned.\u201d He was from Long Island and had lived in Sweden, which he loved because it was \u201cless hierarchical.\u201d Nammack said he was \u201cleft of Lenin\u201d when one of the activists accused him of being a vigilante. (When Tucker Carlson reached out to have Nammack on his show, he told Carlson to \u201cfuck off.\u201d)\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>As far as the name, and the fortysomething dude\u2019s problem with it: \u201cThere\u2019s two statues of panthers at an entrance to the park,\u201d Nammack pointed out, gesturing toward the two limestone pedestals designed by Stanford White. The panthers had been sculpted by Alexander Phimister Proctor, and had been there since 1898.<\/p>\n<p>Didn\u2019t matter. \u201cUsing the Panthers as your group\u2019s name is kind of abhorrent to me,\u201d said one of the girls. She was white, wearing cut-off jean shorts, loafers with socks, and a Baggu purse. \u201cIt feels antithetical to what the Black Panthers would stand for.\u201d The next girl to speak said her name was Sky. She, too, was white, and had also grown up in the neighborhood: \u201cIt\u2019s easy to be wrong about who you\u2019re going after, particularly when those are some of the few black people still living in the neighborhood, and they\u2019ve been pushed out on the streets by all white, ultra-wealthy people.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe can be the tigers!\u201d suggested Dionne, the middle-aged woman next to me. Sweet Dionne.<\/p>\n<p><span>But what <\/span><em>should<\/em><span> they reasonably do about the man who had killed Moose? He\u2019d reportedly been spotted swinging a stick on Flatbush Avenue, chasing down another woman and <\/span><em>her<\/em><span> dog in the park while screaming, \u201cLet\u2019s see some action here!\u201d The kid with the speaker spoke up: \u201cSo, it sounds like this person has been pushed out of an unimaginable amount of systems.\u201d He added that the assailant was probably \u201cneurodivergent.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p>\u201cCrime is an abstract term that means nothing in a lot of ways,\u201d said Sky. \u201cThe construct of crime has been so socially constructed to target black and poor people.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u201cRight, yeah, I agree with you!\u201d countered one of the older folks, who seemed confused.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Damien\u2014the one black guy here, who had emigrated to Park Slope from Trinidad and Tobago\u2014chimed in. \u201cJust to levelset the room, we\u2019re not here to cause harm or be vigilantes to anyone. Maybe we could work together to find a solution, because I don\u2019t fucking know what the solution is, but we all want the same thing.\u201d Do we?\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>A woman in a blue jumpsuit approached the group, pulling her gray hood over her blue cap that read \u201cACAB\u201d (as in, \u201cAll Cops Are Bastards\u201d) in big white block letters. Her name was Cece.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>She suggested we could build a community where we all took care of each other and no one ever had to call the police. Someone else said, \u201cI get angry and lash out at people when I\u2019m hungry and haven\u2019t slept well and people are being mean to me all day.\u201d Another observed, \u201cI\u2019ve never killed a dog, but we\u2019ve all hurt people.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>A homeless person named Minx joined us: \u201cThe biggest threat that I feel is from people like you.\u201d And then Minx started tearing up. \u201cYou have the power to hurt me so much more than I have the power to hurt you.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><span>Now Nammack was trying to prove his bona fides. Did he mention Occupy Wall Street? And Sweden? All of this was Reagan\u2019s fault for slashing social services. \u201cI saw someone whose shorts were covered in dried blood and his hand was bloody,\u201d relayed CeCe, but she didn\u2019t call the cops on<\/span><em> him<\/em><span>. \u201cMy brother has dementia and there were points where if you got near him he would bite you,\u201d Dionne confided. Finally, Nammack had to go. He said he\u2019d follow up with everyone over email with \u201cnext steps.\u201d Nammack asked Damien if he wanted to head the working group to come up with a mission statement. Sky asked if it could be on a Google doc so \u201cwe can all feel comfortable participating,\u201d since we hadn\u2019t exactly established a \u201cphilosophy of safety\u201d quite yet.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>The next day Nammack emailed everyone\u2014minus the kids who\u2019d interrupted. \u201cTheir youthful disruptive method is not what will move us forward so I am not including them in this initiative right now,\u201d he explained. He booked a room in the library for the next meeting, and one of the older women was going to bring some information on self-defense and how they might get pepper spray.<\/p>\n<p>But then the meeting was pushed a week because someone was visiting friends in Connecticut, and then Nammack was busy with Climate Week. In the meantime, Nammack met with two staffers at the office of his local council person, Shahana Hanif, about the dangerous homeless man with the stick. \u201cThey said their biggest concern is that the perpetrator is not arrested and sent to Rikers because they are concerned for his wellbeing!!!\u201d he wrote in an email to the group.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Soon after, Nammack woke up to red graffiti on the sidewalk outside his front door:<\/p>\n<p>\u201cDon\u2019t be a cop, Kris.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>CORRECTION: <\/strong><span>An earlier version of this piece said that the Occupy Wall Street movement took place in 2008. In fact, it took place in 2011.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><em><strong><span>Suzy\u2019s most recent essay was about the <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.commonsense.news\/p\/generation-swipe?utm_source=profile&amp;utm_medium=reader2\" rel=\"\">casualties of online dating.<\/a><span> You can read all of her work <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/substack.com\/profile\/13349169-suzy-weiss\" rel=\"\">here<\/a><span>. <\/span><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>(Paul Matzner via Alamy)In the last couple of months in Park Slope\u2014the baby bjorn-wearing capital of bourgeois-bohemian New York\u2014a thief absconded with $200,000 worth of jewelry in a smash and<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1649327,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1649325","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1649325","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1649325"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1649325\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1649327"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1649325"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1649325"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1649325"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}