Dorchester neighbors join up to see results

Dorchester neighbors join up to see results

BANDING TOGETHER: From left, Margaret Gooden, Marguerite Springer, Trena Ambroise and Cassie Avery-Grice, members of the Dorchester crime watch team Redefining Our Community, patrol the streets.
By Jessica Fargen  |   Sunday, January 16, 2011  |  http://www.bostonherald.com  |  Local Coverage
Photo by Mark Garfinkel

More than 100 crime watches have formed in Boston in the past two years. An inside look at one Dorchester group shows just how much a neighborhood can accomplish.

Trena Ambroise started Redefining Our Community, or ROC, in the summer of 2009. It has grown to become much more than a crime watch, and has renewed the neighborhood’s spirit. Here’s what its members have done:

• Ambroise and neighbors collected petition signatures to make Hopkins Street a one-way. They lobbied for four new stop signs at Corbet and Evans streets, and “slow” signs. “They would fly down this street,” she said of drivers.

• Maggie Drovineaud, 47, who lives on Crowell Street, got a party house next door shut down, thanks to the crime watch.

Drovineaud had met Ambroise at a crime watch meeting and told her about the all-night parties on her street. She’d repeatedly called the police, but the partiers would always come back after police left.

Ambroise gave Drovineaud her cell phone number and told her to call anytime. She did just that a short time later and, thanks to Ambroise’s help, police raided the house the next day. That was two months ago and it’s been quiet since. “It was an accident waiting to happen,” she said.

A recent homicide on her street has only intensified her resolve. “We’re going to organize a little more now,” she said.

• Cassie Avery-Grice, who lives on Nelson Street, went to a crime watch meeting in September, where she told a mayor’s staffer about graffiti on a sidewalk by her house that had been there since 2008. It was promptly removed. “You can’t say, ‘I can’t get anything done,’ ” she said. “If we band together, we can make things happen.”

Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view.bg?articleid=1309803