So Much For Quiet Little Albany

Tell me if you've heard this before: When I mention that I live in Albany, I mostly get comments about the quality of the schools and the town's reputation as a great place to raise a family, as well as the envious mumblings about the cost of real estate here. In other words, I almost always come away feeling good about my adopted hometown.

But another side of Albany has been rearing its head more than I'd like in the form of a crimewave, and my neighborhood—the Dartmouth corridor—has been ground zero. Don't get me wrong—I understand that we live in the middle of a sprawling metropolis, and thus a certain amount of crime is to be expected. So when the house two doors down from us was broken into a couple of years ago, I didn't give it much thought. And when I started hearing about a rash of car break-ins, including a couple of incidents in which catalytic converters were removed from vehicles parked on the street, I barely batted an eye. 

I'll admit, I started to perk up when another neighbor was taken away by the FBI for allegedly garnering investments for a fictional bank and then living off his ill-gotten gains. An anomaly, I told myself. And a very amusing story, to boot (well, for me, not those who made investments in the make-believe bank).

But things have gotten out of hand of late. In the past few weeks:

-A home across the street from us was broken into in broad daylight;

-Neighbors have become increasingly concerned about the series of shady characters coming and going from the infamously dilapidated house at 1111 Cornell (including a registered child molester); 

-Albany police found themselves in a , with guns drawn and the 1000 block of Cornell closed off, when a distraught woman barricaded herself in the house with a knife following a very public domestic dispute (see the Patch story: http://albany.patch.com/articles/breaking-police-respond-to-domestic-dis...); and, most recently

-A good friend and neighbor was cornered by potential attackers while walking home from Ashkenaz late one night (I don't have the full story, but he was able to avoid any violence).

I don't know about the rest of you, but this is a lot more action than I expect here. I mean, while it's handy to use this crime spree to deflect claims that Albany is an elitist suburb where shiny, happy families wash their Priuses, walk to yoga class, and dine at one of the endless choices of nearby restaurants safe from the big, bad world. But while I don't want to be pigeonholed as a another privileged white man distancing himself from the edgier (read: more crime-ridden) communities around us, I also want to know that, when my young children start to explore their surroundings outside of my supervision, they'll be safe from the nefarious presences that apparently lurk around us.

Fortunately, one of Albany's many wonderful qualities is that neighbors really talk to each other about what's going on, and thus there's been a lot of discussion in our neighborhood about this disturbing string of events.

But this discussion needs to be taken to a new level. Whether this string of crimes has been limited to our neighborhood, or Albany has been seeing an uptick in crime citywide, we, as a community, need to nip this in the bud, lest we one day be lumped in with Berkeley and El Cerrito.

And heaven knows, none of us wants that.