On a recent Friday afternoon, off-duty firefighter Eddie De La Cruz leisurely walks past Bainbridge Avenue along East 196th Street and stops in front of Our Lady of Refuge Church to chat with Father John Jenik, the parish’s longtime leader. They both greet people passing by — mostly parents with their kids — with pleasantries in English and Spanish.

The only sense that this interaction is happening in the most dangerous neighborhood in the 52nd Precinct, and one of the toughest in the northwest Bronx, is a handful of young men wearing hoodies and expensive sneakers milling menacingly in front of a six-story apartment building down the block. They’re on the lookout and waiting to take over these streets when darkness comes.

“These guys, they’re grown men, in their 20s and they’re playing football in the streets in the middle of the night, making all kinds of noise,” Jenik says, incredulous.

They might be doing more than just playing football. The building is overrun with small-time gangs and drug dealers, Jenik says, much like many of the buildings in what police call Sector G (or George), an area of Fordham-Bedford (between Fordham Road and Bedford Park Boulevard) where crime is rampant.

Crime By Numbers

Every New York City precinct is broken up into sectors, or neighborhoods. Of the 15 sectors within the 52nd Precinct — including neighborhoods within Fordham-Bedford, Norwood, University Heights, Bedford Park, Fordham, University Heights and Kingsbridge Heights — Sector G is, by far, where the most crime occurs.

A man named Nathaniel, who declined to give his last name for fear of reprisal, works security for a group of buildings in Sector G. He says he’s seen everything from fights to drive-by shootings in his years working in the neighborhood. Drugs are everywhere, he says.

Nathaniel also lives in the 52nd Precinct, near West 190th Street and University Avenue, also known as Sector C. “People say hi to each other, you don’t see that much drug activity going around,” he said. “There’s not that much killings over there, [no] shootings, [no] drugs — everything is practically good over there.”

From 2006 to 2011, 1,528 crimes were committed in Sector G. That’s 11.5 percent of all the 13,303 crimes committed in the 52 Precinct during that time and nearly 200 more crimes than Sector D, the next worst neighborhood (and 331 more crimes than in Sector C).

In sum, that number, 1,528, means very little because a shoplifting incident is weighted the same as a murder. Each equals one when it comes to calculating crime statistics in a precinct, in a borough, in a city. It’s one reason, Jenik says, why city officials continue to say crime is going down every year for the past two decades. But a look inside the numbers of Sector G paints a darker picture.

During those six years, more than one in every four of the precinct’s murders — 25 out of 94 (26.6 percent) — and one of every five rapes — 29 out of 140 (20.7 percent) — occurred in Sector G. The area also led the precinct in felony assaults, which include shootings and stabbings, with 353 (13.7 percent of precinct’s assaults). Its next closest competitor was Sector B in University Heights, which had 80 fewer assaults during the same time period.

Sector G was no slouch when it came to robberies (third), burglaries (second) and grand larcenies (tied for second; first was Sector D, which includes most of Fordham Road where credit card fraud, a grand larceny, is prevalent). The only category in which Sector G finished in the bottom half was auto thefts.

A History of Violence

While still only a six-year window into Sector G, the statistics, obtained by the Norwood News through a Freedom of Information Law request, tell the story of this neighborhood for the past 30-plus years.

That’s roughly about the time, 1978, when Jenik arrived at Our Lady of Refuge. Since then, he’s been railing — on the pulpit, in the streets, in the media — about the neighborhood’s crime problems, which he attributes largely to the drug trade.

“The drugs have never left,” he said.

To bring attention to the problem during the 1990s, Jenik began holding services on street corners dominated by drug dealers. It brought a lot of media attention and periodic bursts of intensive police activity. But when the attention faded, the drugs and the violence returned.

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, however, Jenik decided his street sermons weren’t worth the police presence they required. It also didn’t seem to make much of a long-term impact. But then again, nothing seems to.

Over the years, Valentine Avenue, between East 196th Street and East 194th, a curving one-way corridor that is not bisected by East 195th Street, has been a haven for a series of organized drug operations. Just two years ago, federal and local authorities culminated a year-long undercover operation with dozens of arrests that dismantled the latest organized drug depot. For several months, to the delight of the corridor’s residents, it was quiet and their doorsteps weren’t beehives of drug activity.

But the drug trade just shifted, down to 194th Street and up to 198th Street. Now, according to Jenik, it’s back on Valentine as well.

Why This Neighborhood?

“It’s partly demographics, partly economics,” says Inspector Joseph Dowling, the commander of the 52nd Precinct.

Sector G is a microcosm of everything that ails the Bronx, where the unemployment rate (now 12.1 percent, down from 14.1 percent just three months ago) is higher than in any county in New York state and the poverty rate hovers around 30 percent.

Sector G is dense with affordable housing, which attracts residents priced out of more affluent neighborhoods, and new immigrants. That doesn’t explain everything, but it’s no secret that crime is higher in poorer communities and Sector G is one of the poorest, if not the poorest, in the precinct.

“Inherently, I believe, people are good,” says Councilman Joel Rivera who represents Sector G. “But put into desperate situations and needing to provide for their families, people turn to desperate measures and crime.”

Dowling says his cops know about the drug activity and are out there making busts daily. But no matter how many arrests are made, the underlying problems remain.

State Senator Gustavo Rivera, a member of the public safety committee, says the trick is to address “micro and the macro” conditions at the same time. That means addressing immediate problems – taking care of quality of life issues and intervening when small beefs escalate into deadly confrontations – with concentrated police efforts and intervention programs that don’t currently cater to the 52nd Precinct.

At the same time, Rivera says, that means addressing underlying problems like poverty and unemployment through better education and job training programs.

The other problem is the local residents who do succeed, often leave. Jenik says he sees this all the time. Recently, two sisters who grew up in the neighborhood and went to OLR both became doctors. They both left the neighborhood in the past year.

Jenik, however, has no plans to leave. He’s concerned but no longer consumed by the crime problems. Besides, he says, “I like it here.”

Other residents feel similarly. On a recent afternoon, many people either didn’t want to talk or said they felt relatively safe walking around.

Eddie De La Cruz, the firefighter, moved to the neighborhood from Washington Heights nine years ago to be with his wife. They now have two young daughters. De La Cruz says it can be loud and fights break out frequently. “But that’s New York,” he says.

Still, when asked about what he will do when his daughters grow older and start wanting to walk around on their own, De La Cruz says, “We hope to move out of the neighborhood by then.”

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Welcome to the Norwood News, a bi-weekly community newspaper that primarily serves the northwest Bronx communities of Norwood, Bedford Park, Fordham and University Heights. Through our Breaking Bronx blog, we focus on news and information for those neighborhoods, but aim to cover as much Bronx-related news as possible. Founded in 1988 by Mosholu Preservation Corporation, a not-for-profit affiliate of Montefiore Medical Center, the Norwood News began as a monthly and grew to a bi-weekly in 1994. In September 2003 the paper expanded to cover University Heights and now covers all the neighborhoods of Community District 7. The Norwood News exists to foster communication among citizens and organizations and to be a tool for neighborhood development efforts. The Norwood News runs the Bronx Youth Journalism Heard, a journalism training program for Bronx high school students. As you navigate this website, please let us know if you discover any glitches or if you have any suggestions. We’d love to hear from you. You can send e-mails to norwoodnews@norwoodnews.org or call us anytime (718) 324-4998.