Life In The West Ward: Flood The Area With Patrols

Easton Police Chief Carl Scalzo, Jr. and several other officers attended a community meeting at the Lot Spot on Northampton Street last Tuesday. Here is what he had to say about what the West Ward can expect as far as police presence:

“Well, like I mentioned to 69 News earlier today, as far as getting into the exact deployment strategies, I can’t say exactly what we’re going to be doing, but, you know, law enforcement is so fluid, so what we always try to do is, obviously, we try to start to identify problems, and we have in the West Ward in the last couple of months. But one of the things we’re going to do is to tackle it with manpower; attack it with different types of patrols, different types of strategies and really just try to flood the area and make it as unwelcome an area as we can. What we’re seeing right now isn’t necessarily houses, isn’t necessarily seeing troubled areas as far as people hanging on porches and problems like that. It’s more transient right now, where cars are coming in and violent crimes are occurring and the cars are driving out, so it’s very different and difficult as far as how you’re going to attack.”
“What would you say as far as what the citizens can do? How do you get them involved if they’re afraid?”
“Everybody wants safe communities to live in, so the big thing we always tell people is ‘Just keep an eye on your neighborhood as far as what you see.’ You don’t have to run out and get involved and try to stop things from happening, but be a very good witness for us and just communicate with us because * that’s * ultimately where we get a lot of our information to solve these things. And usually it’s the solving that gets these individuals off the streets. Once they commit these things once, you find these individuals are doing these things over and over, so the quicker we can get ‘em, the quicker we can identify the problem. The sooner we can get it to stop not only in that neighborhood but in all neighborhoods, and that’s what our goal is. But as far as what we’re dealing with right now, in the West Ward, it’s gonna be basically flood it. And we’re going to be encountering individuals, walking up and talking to them and trying to find out what people are doing, a lot of different types of patrols trying to flood the area so we don’t have any more of this. It’s just one of those things: it’s like trying to catch lightning sometimes—trying to figure out where it’s gonna hit next, but we’re gonna do everything we can.” 

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