Thurston Road Street Watch

Thurston Road Street Watch is a pilot program in the 19th Ward to identify drug houses and open air drug markets in the 19th Ward. The street watch committee is now working with the City of Rochester legal department and RPD on identifying houses in the 19th ward that are known as drug houses.

What have we done:

• Seven City Court judges came to a community meeting and heard a community's frustration (virtually unprecedented) 
• we had a County liaison attach himself to the 19th Ward (until his position was eliminated) to review welfare fraud 
• the City itself has taken on the very complicated legal task of finding a way to help community associations to close down drug houses as a result of our efforts 
• the foreclosure issue in our community was first brought up at a Street Watch meeting and the fact that the meetings will become even more central to re-setting police/community relations
• INS and ATF attended our meeting and have started an open investigation on one of our stores who maybe selling drugs and committing food stamp fraud
• Both District Attorney's office and the Public Defenders office came to review sentencing guidlines for different types of crime and heard our voices about what we believe should happen
• Created a list of known drug houses throughout the 19th ward as possible candidates for street watch effort
• Letter from my office went to landlord of one drug house letting him know how his property was being used. The landlord evicted that person. 
• City Attorney Spencer Ash attended a meeting to discuss legislative actions taking place around drug houses.