Crown Heights-Its time to declare war

It's time to declare war





To all New Yorkers, but especially my neighbors in Crown Heights, Brooklyn: Do not forget the name, face and tragic death of Chanel Petro-Nixon, the 16-year-old girl who was strangled last week and dumped in front of 212 Kingston Ave.
Do not let her become one more victim who slips from our memories.

Cut this article out and save it where you can see it daily. Look at the face of Chanel - a bright, beautiful child with a promising future. Her murder shows how violent, broken and out-of-control our neighborhood has become. If you don't want to call the police, contact me with any information about what happened to Chanel. We must let the murderers know we won't let our neighborhood sink back into the chaos of the past.

As any cop or urban planner will tell you, a neighborhood isn't truly safe until its women - especially women responsible for young children - feel comfortable walking the streets. By that measure, the violent murder of a girl last seen on a Sunday at 6:30 p.m. and the dumping of her body in public sends the opposite signal: Crown Heights remains a place where demons in human form feel free to prey on the innocent without fear of capture.

It's the same brazen evil that led some worthless coward to fire a bullet last weekend through the front door of Brenda Scott, a grandmother and tenant leader actively trying to drive dope dealers out of Brooklyn's Ebbets Field housing complex. The bullet, intended as a warning, has backfired: a growing band of fedup neighbors are now intent on making sure Scott receives all the protection she needs.

We ought to begin raising loud questions about what the police are doing - or failing to do - to stem a crisis that has been building for years. The two police precincts that cover Crown Heights - the 77th and the 71st - have seen sharp spikes in murder in recent years.

Homicides, up 9% citywide so far this year, have climbed 33.3% in the 77th over the past five years, and are up 120% in the 71st Precinct over the same period. In 2005, the 71st saw the highest percentage increase in murders in New York City. As my Daily News colleague Robert Moore recently wrote, a single stretch of President St. in Crown Heights saw four murders over four weeks.

Last year, as the body count mounted, 1 Police Plaza assigned a small contingent of rookies to do extra patrols in the 71st Precinct. That response, we now know, was inadequate.

If Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly hasn't already called the commanders from Crown Heights on the carpet, it's long past time. The cops don't seem to have the manpower, the deployment strategies, the gang and drug intelligence or the community contacts they need to bring the situation under control. The ultimate solution rests not with the cops, but with all of us who live and work in the community. Too many people see things and keep silent.

To this day, nobody has claimed the sizable cash rewards offered for information on the killers of Benny Lyde, an honors college student gunned down last September, or Hyacinth Cespedes, a grandmother in a wheelchair killed in crossfire last August.

Nobody wants to return to the days when gunfire crackled nightly throughout the neighborhood. But we're well on our way back to that dark place if we cannot keep our children and grandmothers safe.