The Stamford Independent

When I was down at the Stamford Government Center the other day for peace rally, I noticed a sign on all the trees outside of the Government Center.

Public Notice: Tree Removal, originally uploaded by Aldon.

Public Notice
Tree Removal

In accordance with the provisions of Ordinance No. 814- Article 1B Sections (4) and (5), NOTICE is hereby given of intent to remove this tree 30 days from the date of this posting.

When I took the picture of the sign, a security guard came up and told me the trees had to come down because they had termites. I knocked on the wood and it seemed pretty solid to me. The trees looked fairly healthy, so I wondered what this was all about.

Later, I started to receive emails from various people asking why the trees were being removed. People talked about sending letters to the Stamford Advocate, to the Tree Warden, and the Mayor’s office in order to get a public hearing about whether or not the trees should be removed. One person wrote that a person from City Hall said the trees were dead or dying and that was the reason they were getting cut down.

I figured I’d make a few calls myself to see what I could find out. I called the number listed on the form, and got an answering machine. I also called the number of a person on the environmental protection board.

Later in the day, I got a phone call from Erin McKenna, who is a Senior Planner at the City of Stamford’s Land Use Bureau. She provided lots of valuable information. The trees in question, honey locust, are not diseased. They are fine, although they are planted a little too closely together which has hampered their growth. They had been planned to be taken down as part of a project to install a sculpture donated by Rubin Nakian.

The plan is to install the sculpture as part of an overall redesign of the entrance to the Government Center. The new entrance is to be designed by Wesley Stout Associates. They are an award winning landscape design firm, whom I was told are very environmentally conscious. The design should be more attractive and provide better shade.

The current schedule is to wait until the plan is received from the design firm. The plan will then be reviewed internally and then publicly. There will be a public hearing about the removal of the trees, but they are hoping to wait until then plan is available to the public before holding such a hearing.

You probably remember Flight 93. That was the hijacked plane that crashed in Pennsylvania because a few brave passengers armed only with cell phones did what none of our government security and intelligence agencies could do—they succeeded in foiling the plot to destroy the U.S. Capitol.

But do you remember Kitty Genovese? She was the woman, now lying buried in New Canaan, whose 1964 rape-murder in a Queens apartment complex led to a New York Times investigative report, "Thirty-Eight Who Saw Murder Didn't Call the Police." The story inspired public outrage and the creation of Neighborhood Watch programs and emergency 911 service in cities across the country.

Decades later, experience has proved the most effective crime prevention programs are ones like these, which connect the police with the communities they serve: Neighborhood Watch, 911, Block Watch, Weed and Seed, community policing, cops on bikes, local police substations.

Smart technology can enhance these efforts. In his 2007 State of the City address, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced plans for a "revolutionary innovation in crime fighting": New York will be the first city in the world to equip 911 call centers to receive digital photos and videos submitted by citizens using cell phones and computers.

What about Stamford? Instead of creating innovative and powerful partnerships between police and residents, our Board of Representatives last week authorized closed-circuit TV cameras throughout the city that will feed surveillance videos into a room at Government Center, where anonymous police officers will sit and watch like Big Brother.

Will the camera operators be secretly tracking you and gathering evidence to use in court? Maybe, but from the numerous documented cases of abuse in other cities, it is more likely that a bored officer will be panning the cameras to follow attractive women, or zooming in on couples engaged in intimate behavior. The effectiveness for crime prevention is dubious.

The National Black Police Association says: "Camera surveillance funds could be better spent to hire and promote additional officers, and training them to work cooperatively with the public they serve."

Retired Marine intelligence officer and CIA agent Robert David Steele says we will be safer if we opt for less secrecy and more of what he terms Open Source Intelligence: "The threats we face don't lend themselves to pre-planned, centrally controlled government direction. Only a nation in which each citizen is both a collector and consumer of intelligence, able to share information adequately and in real time, will survive the tribulations to come."

So instead of surveillance cameras, let’s have more cops on the beat interacting with residents. Let’s have more support for our school crossing guards—they know more about problems in the neighborhood than anyone, and are a lot smarter and friendlier than cameras. Let’s have pedestrian-friendly urban design—if people simply did more walking they would see the city from a different perspective, and street crime would plummet.

Let’s have more outreach and opportunities for young people, not a bunker mentality in City Hall that treats citizens as objects for suspicion and spying.

Let’s put the "public" back in public safety.