Across the street from his house, Mike D’Arcy chats with his neighbors, founding members of the Kingston Uptown Residents Alliance. From right to left: Michael D’Arcy, Doris Soldner, Eric Winchell, Jerry Soldner. Photo: Celia Seupel

Michael D’Arcy is making sausage and onions tonight.  Scarlett, his sprightly 9-year-old who likes to run barefoot, shouts from the living room and demands help.  D’Arcy covers the skillet, folds his arms across his compact body, tattoo peeping out of a sleeve, and peers at Scarlett’s computer screen.  On the other side of the narrow living room, Tristan, 7, broods over the computer game.

Garrulous ex-marine, former chef, gardener of backyard herbs and stay-at-home dad, 37-year-old D’Arcy is an unlikely crusader for public safety.  He was never involved in a civic association or local politics.  He wasn’t even in student government at Rondout Valley High School, but when Kingston’s violent crime entered D’Arcy’s back yard on Feb. 20, 2010, an activist was born.

It was Friday evening, sometime between 9:30 and 10:00 p.m. D’Arcy and his wife, Claudia, had just turned out the lights when they heard sobbing.  As the sobbing grew louder, Claudia crawled out of bed and peered out the window. She saw their friend, Gretta Scoe, disappear into her small house at the back of their neighboring yards.

Minutes later, as the D’Arcys lay wondering, sirens wailed down the street. The couple threw on clothes and ran next door.

“The EMTs were already treating her,” Claudia recalls. “She ended up with a big egg on her head and two huge black eyes. She had to have stitches between her eyes.”  The D’Arcys learned that Scoe had been attacked from behind as she walked home only half a block away on the corner of Wall and St. James streets. As Scoe struggled, she was thrown to the ground, landing on her face. The assailant got her purse: $20 and a debit card.

“My wife walks past that corner every day. Every morning, every afternoon,” says D’Arcy.  “I couldn’t sleep.”  Online all night, D’Arcy searched for resources—neighborhood associations, civilian patrols, some way to make sure an attack like that didn’t happen again.  He found nothing for Kingston, so he made his own. By 8 a.m., D’Arcy says, the flyers were ready.

Claudia puts it more like noon. “He woke me up around five in the morning and said he was going to start a neighborhood watch. That afternoon, we were handing out flyers.  By Saturday night, the logo was designed.” The D’Arcys’ neighborhood blog was transformed into the official Kingston Neighborhood Watch site. “We had our first meeting on Sunday.” Claudia laughs. “It’s been a wild ride ever since.”

Claudia D’Arcy’s profession, Internet search and social marketing, has been instrumental. “Within six weeks, we had over 1,000 hits on our Facebook site,” says Claudia.

The Kingston Neighborhood Watch holds pot-luck meetings and encourages residents to meet their neighbors and neighborhood children, to watch out for each other and to report suspicious or criminal activity. It also organizes neighborhood walks to raise awareness.  Members don bright yellow shirts and, armed with flashlights and whistles, walk as a group through streets that have known violence, talking to residents.

Still, after almost six months in action, D’Arcy finds his membership numbers disappointing. “Only 166 members in a city of 23,000,” says D’Arcy. “Why?”

Whatever the reason, it is not for a lack of crime.  The Kingston Crime Reports map shows a total of 145 crimes reported in the city of Kingston during the month of July 2010, including breaking and entering, violent robbery, assault, and property crimes. Almost every month, police reports show, there are reports of shots fired.

According to Kingston Police Chief Gerald M. Keller, a 38-year veteran of the department, crime is better in Kingston than in similar nearby cities such as Poughkeepsie and Middletown and a lot better than it was in the early ’90s. “It was a hot time,” says Keller, “a very bad situation in midtown and Broadway East.” Broadway East was a housing project notorious for drugs and shootings. The complex was eventually cleaned up in the late ’90s after new management hired private security and evicted about 50 families, according to Keller.

Still, for residents, the city’s crime rate in contrast to surrounding bucolic farmlands and small villages can seem outsized. According to New York State Department of Criminal Justice statistics, Kingston experienced 759 Part I or “index” crimes in 2009. Index crimes include murder, rape, aggravated assault, and property crimes.  Kingston accounted for 22 percent of Ulster County’s violent crime and 70 percent of the county’s burglaries.

Poughkeepsie and Middletown crime figures are higher. Kingston shows a 37 percent decline in property and violent crime since 2005, whereas Middletown shows only a 4.5 percent decline and Poughkeepsie shows none.  According to criminologist Alan Lizotte, Dean of SUNY Albany’s School of Criminal Justice, comparing a city’s Part I statistics to cities of similar population and geographic area is a good way to evaluate the crime rate.

“Under 1,000 Part I crimes a year is not bad for a city the size of Kingston,” says Keller.

“Not bad?” says D’Arcy.  “Try telling that to a family that lives in midtown, or the store owner who had his window shot out.”  D’Arcy hastens to add that the police and sheriff’s departments have been very helpful. “What the police have done with the neighborhood watch is amazing. Many patrolmen have stepped up and given me their phone numbers.”

But D’Arcy perceives a “huge divide” between city police and citizens. “I’ve talked to hundreds of people and there is a lack of trust between people and the police.”

“There was a time when cops were around all the time,” says Margaret Napoli, a 30-year-resident of Kingston. While walking her dog on the evening of July 1, 2010, Napoli rounded the corner of Clinton Street just as a man shot two other men only a block away from her home. “It’s getting bad. They should bring the state police in.”

Cops walking a beat—one crime solution often mentioned by residents—is not an option, according to Keller. The police department does not have the manpower—12 to 15 sworn officers per shift—and the city does not have the money.  Kingston police patrol in their cars, frequently responding to emergency calls. They rarely emerge just to mingle, and, residents say, communication suffers.

D’Arcy is trying to forge a new kind of bond between the public and the police, a contract of mutual aid.  According to city council representatives, the tech-savvy D’Arcys are already succeeding.

“One of the biggest differences the neighborhood watch has made,” says Jennifer Fuentes, alderwoman for D’Arcy’s Ward 5, “is ClickFix.”

The neighborhood watch website devotes a page to reporting problems using SeeClickFix.com. It’s easy to mark the problem-spot on the Kingston map and post a complaint. Suspicious character lurking.  Dangerous speeding.  Drug dealing. Other people can add their voices to the complaint, vote to have it fixed and see other issues that have been reported, too.

“We never had anything like this before,” says Fuentes. “People are posting regularly. People are taking the time to report things.  It’s even on the Daily Freeman site now,” said Fuentes, referencing the local daily newspaper. “It’s pretty impressive.”

“The neighborhood watch has brought a number of community members together,” says Andrea Turco-Levin, Alderwoman for Kingston’s Ward 1. Turco-Levin showed up on D’Arcy’s doorstep the day after the Kingston Neighborhood Watch was born and asked how she could help.  “He’s created an awareness at a grassroots level.  One way Mike D’Arcy has really influenced me is when I see something going on, something suspicious or wrong, I don’t just say to myself ‘Oh, that’s disgusting,’ I call the police dispatcher now and I tell them.”

“It’s difficult to do as a volunteer,” says Fuentes. “Mike’s degree of commitment and energy is fantastic. When he started I made him promise he wouldn’t burn out.”

“I’m here to stay,” says D’Arcy. But he does admit to getting discouraged at times.  “Then my wife reels me back in,” says D’Arcy. “She says, ‘Just calm down. Let’s just do this.’”

Claudia D’Arcy leans back in the kitchen chair, tired from work and not yet ready to eat. Scarlett runs into the kitchen with Pumpkin the cat draped over her shoulder, looking for dinner. D’Arcy dishes up sausages for the kids and takes the sausages and the kids back into the living room.

“When we first met,” Claudia says, “I didn’t even own a computer. He was the geek and I was the activist. Now it’s totally reversed.” Still, she admits to wondering if she and her husband have made themselves into targets.

“Everybody knows where we live,” says Claudia. “But I’m not going to change my life or how I walk home because of it. I just can’t think about that.”

Grit runs in the family, but if anyone is inspired by the softer side, it’s D’Arcy. “My wife and my kids empower me in a way the military never did,” he says. “I do it for them: for my friends, for my neighbors.”

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