Criminal Element ‘Hijacking’ Community- Activist Says
By Michael Horowitz
BRONX, NEW YORK, JUNE 12- A criminal element is “hijacking” Co-op City and its shareholders, destroying the quality of life that shareholders are entitled to, civic activist Junius Williams charged this week.
The civic activist said that his goal is to assure that Co-op City does not become the nation’s largest urban ghetto.
Williams, the parliamentarian of the Building 21 Association and an unsuccessful candidate in last month’s Riverbay board election, said, “I’m not happy with just heat and hot water. I want the whole enchilada when it comes to quality of life in the community where I live.”
Williams has blamed Co-op City’s Department of Public Safety for the recent shooting of a young man at the basketball courts at Bellamy Loop.
The civic activist noted that the young men, who had been harassing him and his neighbors for close to one year, stopped hanging out at the Bellamy Loop basketball courts after last month’s shooting.
A Co-op City shareholder, who wished to remain unidentified, told the News, this week, that the criminal element, who had been hanging out at the Bellamy Loop basketball courts, are now hanging out in the vicinity of Building 24.
The unidentified shareholder said that those hanging out there routinely smoke marijuana, and Public Safety officers, despite being called, have done little to stop this infringement on his quality of life.
Williams, for his part, stressed, “I want to make sure that they don’t come back here to destroy my quality of life and the quality of life that my neighbors have a right to enjoy.”
The civic activist said that if Public Safety officers had been proactive in removing the young men who were hanging out at the Bellamy Loop basketball courts on the night of the shooting, the crime would never have occurred.
“I blame the people in charge of management for what my neighbors I have had to live through,” Williams stressed. “I don’t blame my neighbors because I know that they have been proactive in reporting infringements on their quality of life to the people in the Public Safety Department,” Williams stressed.
The civic activist added, “The people in the Public Safety Department seem to think that we have to accept things because we have a large minority community. This kind of thing didn’t happen in Co-op City when people from other races and ethnicities were dominant in this community.”
Williams stressed that it is incumbent upon Co-op City’s shareholders to demand that they have the same quality of life that people on Manhattan’s Eastside and in Riverdale enjoy.
