Kyle Decoteau, 22, was shot and killed in Bedford-Stuyvesant in the early hours of July 20, 2011.
His death and its aftermath, which saw a wave of anti-crime sentiment ripple through the neighborhood, highlighted two facts about Bed-Stuy: though safer than in the past, it’s still plagued by crime; and its residents are fed up with the plague.
“It is time for community members to speak out,” said Kurtis Miller, who tutored Decoteau in math, reading, and writing for six years. “Criminals need to be made to understand that their actions have an effect on people, and themselves as well, in time.”
Bed-Stuy’s reputation as a dangerous neighborhood had even seeped into pop culture. Billy Joel’s 1980 single “You May Be Right” used the phrase “I walked through Bedford-Stuy alone” as evidence against the singer’s own sanity. Jay-Z, who grew up in Bed-Stuy’s famous Marcy Houses, raps about rising from the mean streets of Brooklyn to superstardom, “from Marcy to Madison Square.”
NYPD crime statistics corroborated the gist of the performers’ words and the reality of Bed Stuy’s violent past. There were 120 murders in 1990 in the neighborhood, which is comprised of the 79th and 81st precincts. There were also 3,886 robberies—more than ten per day.
But over the course of the next decade, crime rates fell dramatically. In 2001, Bed-Stuy’s precincts reported 43 murders and 1,046 robberies. Between 1990 and 2001, total instances of the “seven major felonies”—murder, rape, robbery, felony assault, burglary, grand larceny, and grand larceny auto—fell by 66 percent.
Ten years later, crime rates are hovering in an uneasy spot: much lower than in the 90’s and still declining, but still too high. Last year, there were 29 murders in the neighborhood. That was enough to give Bed-Stuy, with a population of 161,290, an intentional homicide rate of nearly 18 per 100,000 residents, almost four times the national rate of 4.8 per 100,000, according to FBI statistics.
The rate is more or less on track to remain the same in 2011.
According to Kim Best, president of the 79th Precinct Community Council and chairperson of Bed-Stuy’s Civic Safety Committee, community concern has been a key factor in the fight against crime.
“It’s very important that the community has taken safety into their own hands,” she said.“The NYPD can’t be everywhere: they can’t put a police officer on every block.”
One way that has been effective has been the establishment of action groups and block associations.
“I oversee more than 200 block associations,” she said. “At night on streets where a lot of crime happens, we have block watches. Certain people will be assigned to monitor the block at night, usually from inside their home. And if anything happens, they have the police on the phone right away.”
According to Best, the number of block associations in the area has grown dramatically since she first became involved with the Civic Safety Committee a decade ago.
Still, 23 people have been killed in Bed-Stuy this year.
One of them was Kyle Decoteau, shot twice on a stoop while trying to cool off on a hot summer night.In the wake of his death, his friends and family set out to galvanize the people of Bed-Stuy.
Ann Decoteau, Kyle’s mother, founded a nonprofit public charity, the Kyle Decoteau Foundation, in the aftermath of her son’s death. It represents just the sort of community-born resistance to crime that Best described as crucial.
The group organizes rallies and is raising money to provide counseling for kids and young men that have participated in or fallen victim to gang-related crime. At a march against violence organized by the foundation and held on Nov. 25, members of Kyle’s family, his friends, and people who had never met him walked through Bed-Stuy, shouting and chanting, their intolerance for crime on full and powerful display.
Decoteau’s tutor, Kurtis Miller, was also moved by his former pupil’s death. He wrote an open letter to the community, published in late August by local media outlets, pleading for peace and sensibility.
“Peace,” he wrote, “is a spiritual rest from within us, an unexplainable feeling far from our own conscious understanding that conquers the very circumstances which cause us to treat one another unkindly.”
Miller is no stranger to people treating each other unkindly. His brother was murdered in Harlem in 1996. He now considers it his duty to use his intimate knowledge of loss and tragedy as a weapon against crime.
“It’s too late for Kyle,” he says. “But there will be so many more like him if we [community members] don’t speak up.”
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