Today, we again have news of another persons stabbed, (multiple times), on Elliot Street. My friend was reading the paper. I didn’t have my reading glasses, but I saw the headline had the word stabbing in it, and I immediately knew it was going to be on Elliot Street and in the early morning hours, as happened over and over again on that street, at that time.
“From the Reformer Article:
BRATTLEBORO >> The Brattleboro Police Department says a man was stabbed early Tuesday morning.
The police reported to the area of Elliot Street and Elliot Terrace where they found the male subject, whose name and age have not yet been released.”
…
Two years ago, I wrote on ibrattleboro . .
“This time it was a robbery and stabbing, As reported in the Reformer. a youth was stabbed and robbed on Elm Street. Suspects are in custody. Its good that suspects are in custody, but its too late.
We need a crime incident map for each year in Brattleboro.
Brattleboro is a safe place overall. When there is a stabbing, beating or robbery on the streets of Brattleboro, it is most often on Elliot Street, and if
not Elliot Street, most often on an one of the few side streets connected to it.
A city minded citizen’s attitude to that might be simply, ” Stay off Elliot and Elm Street after a certain time of night”
In cities, this is how citizens react. The violence is made normal in this way.
In contrast a small town minded citizen’s reaction might be
“This is nuts ! We know, we can predict, that if there is another stabbing or beating on the streets of Brattleboro, it will most likely happen on or very near Elliot Street, and probably during a relatively small number of hours. So we have do something to prevent that from happening, or at least as a measurable goal, decrease the number of incidents from whatever the current rate to say, half that amount per given amount of time.”
Our police department is hardly pressed, and at times has been understaffed. Its not their fault that they don’t have enough men and women to prevent this from happening again. BUT, the first step in correcting a problem is identifying it. Elliot Street appears to need a highly visible and constant police presence on Elliot Street from 12 – 5 AM. Without a police officer in view at those times, the drunks who get violent are going to go at it again. The question is, are we going to decide to fund this level of presence? Are we going to support the police, and do something about this complete predictable scenario happening again ?
It is nuts
I like the second option – of saying and thinking we can do something about it.
Of course, what should we do about it? Better education? Better jobs? Better sense of a future? The root causes need a lot of work.
Sometimes a bandage can save a life
In our effort to prevent the next knife attack on Elliot Street
we could make a list of all the possible factors that contribute to that happening.
The list could include education, poverty, lead paint, the number of bars on and near Elliot Street, consumption of alcohol before the attack, child rearing, police presence at the time bars let out, pay raises for the police so that we are not short staffed during the crucial hours of 12 – 5, the effects of the decrease in federal funds for mental health care and on and on. Obviously, there must be other worthy points that I am not covering.
The list includes things that cannot possible explain why the stabbings are occurring on Elliot Street between the hours of midnight and 6 AM.
My personal take is that SOME of this is related to people being drunk and violent, shortly after the bars close. If that is true, giving more resources for preventative policing might work. But the causes of the stabbings are debatable. What’s not really that debatable is where they are occurring, and where we need prevention, however that prevention is conceived of.
A debate about specific solutions seems worthy of the effort. But similarly to global warming, the lengthy debate of these topics could go on for years without meaningful action being taken. In the meantime, if the last 15 years is any indication, we will have more stabbings on Elliot Street, and in that area, at that time.
I still think a first action might be to be to make the crime map. As I say,I have lived here for 15 years. I knew where and when the stabbing was as soon as I saw the headline saying there was a stabbing. The map would help everyone be able to be aware of the problem. Then maybe action would be more likely.
For now, . . it just keeps happening.
Tough one
Wouldn’t your crime map just show Elliot Street? If Elliot street is the problem – so much that we “know” an incident happened there by the headline, then a map isn’t necessary. Just show a map and color Elliot Street red. Let the color smudge into neighboring areas, and the work is basically done.
There have been calls for better policing of Elliot Street since the 1800’s. I think everyone knows that the location has had problems.
Prohibition was a failure, so that won’t work.
I still think the root causes are the real issue. One can blame the location or substance, but it is a person, probably in some sort of internal pain, who chooses to go out and drown their sorrows and do something that could cause death or injury. That isn’t a healthy person making smart choices. We have to solve THAT problem.
If you make the map, though, it can go up here for all to see and debate.
Prohibition didn't work but this isn't working either
Violence itself is a root cause of both psychic pain, and more violence. That’s just another reason it needs to be stopped whenever it can be. The location is not the cause. We can debate what it is about the location that causes the violence, but the location is merely where we need to focus efforts.
I would argue that since the violence is happening shortly after the bars close, on the street where the bars are concentrated, and because some of the violence has been perpetrated by drunk people, Alcohol is probably a factor. It is after all, medically known to make some people violent. The nasty drunk, is a dangerous variety of human being.
Not all people, just some.
We can’t as a town heal the “inner sorrows” of every person. We can, maybe, if we have clarity of purpose, help prevent some drunks from attacking others, at least long enough for them to sleep it off. The next morning, they awake with a hangover, instead of in jail. Its a case where the band aid approach actually prevents a lot more harm from potentially happening, as well as the psychic pain that you are talking about.
As a whole, society has agreed to not interfere with the availability of alcohol to any adult who wants it.
That of course doesn’t mean that we don’t have a responsibility to protect people from getting knifed on Elliot Street, since we know that is where most of the violence is going to occur.
You are correct, the map is really just confirming what we already know, but could help with the clarity of purpose that will be needed. My prediction is that if we map all acts of street violence, Elliot Street is red (for most likely), and most other sections will be green. The goal would be to get Elliot Street to be not much different in color than any other street, including Spruce, Bonnyvale or Tyler Street.