By Michael Hill
Correspondent
With a stage as big as Newark’s Broad and Market and after inviting the media to cover his latest “Occupy the Block,” Mayor Ras Baraka chastised the media for coming and covering.
The rebuke started with this: “Come on man! Ya’ll not going to turn this into a circus are you? Please don’t follow me around with these cameras like that. Please.”
Then, in an interview Baraka said, “What I’m telling you is that it’s not important to you for people to see that we’re coming up to their neighborhoods because it’s going to be safe up there. What’s important to you and other folks is that we’re down here because priority wise that’s more of a story for you than it is for an African-American woman who lives on Clinton and Chadwick, has to come out of her home every day and see abandoned property and guys on the street and drugs and gangs going on.”
As a matter of policy for two years, the mayor and a huge entourage from city government — sometimes with celebrities in tow — walk neighborhoods throughout Newark to meet the people, hear and address their concerns, offer hope and job applications and to push back against the intrusion of crime.
“We’re coming here to pay some attention to this but the reality is people don’t live down here. We’re trying to get people to live down here,” Baraka said.
The new public safety director says in a two-week period, police made 50 arrests and issued more than 100 summonses for drugs, public urination and counterfeit merchandise sales after adding 15 officers to the Broad and Market area.
“We’re going to be hitting this hard almost every day until we get some normalcy down here and we see less complaints. Our results are going to be when we have diminished the amount of complaints, then we’ll know that it’s working,” said Newark Public Safety Director Anthony Ambrose.
Pedestrians and city residents praised the mayor’s efforts.
“It’s about time they clean up Newark. It really is. It’s about time. It was due,” said former resident Deborah Sales.
While the mayor’s a welcome sight at Broad and Market, not everyone welcomes the job the mayor is doing.
“For myself and brother like him, he don’t do nothing for us. He’s here to protect the stadium. We’ve been living here all our lives, getting killed and shot. Brothers get shot they don’t even get reported, so he don’t do nothing for us,” said Newark resident Sharod Moore.
Moore said he wants the mayor to do more to provide job opportunities in Newark and that had some city workers defending the mayor.
“People need jobs, but people also need to be job ready,” said Tamika Darden-Thomas, who works in community relations for the Newark Youth One Stop Career Center.
“People like this will stand here all day long. But, he’s nowhere trying to find a job. So you talk the talk but you got to walk the walk,” said Newark Code Enforcement Officer Joanne Williams.
And walking is what Mayor Baraka and city workers do as they try to change New Jersey’s largest city — neighborhood by neighborhood.