Crown Heights Leader Richard Green Talks About Doing Better on Hate

Amid Hate Spike, a Crown Heights Leader Pleads: "We have to do better"

By Reuven Blau, The City

On Christmas Day, Richard Green, head of the Crown Heights Youth Collective, walked toward his rundown white van with a group of cops after giving out toys to kids at Brooklyn’s Kings County Hospital.

The Dodge Ram is the last of a fleet that once numbered 21 street outreach vans, roaming the neighborhood to counsel teens and prevent violent outbursts — including those targeting Lubavitch Jews who live, work and pray in Crown Heights in large numbers.

“The officers were teasing me, saying, ‘Why don’t you get a new van?’” Green recalled. “It’s a 2001 and when it goes out of service, it’s going straight to the junkyard.”

He began the program nearly three decades ago as a key peacekeeping effort following three days of riots.

But government funding to keep the program alive no longer exists, Green said. Similar initiatives, like public school gyms staying open at night, have diminished or disappeared, he noted.

“Folks sort of don’t realize the importance of peacekeeping,” Green said. “Now we are seeing the toothpaste coming out of the tube and we are trying to get it back in.”

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Green’s organization, meanwhile, has struggled to stay afloat in the neighborhood, which is gentrifying but still has significant black and Jewish populations.

Government funding, aside from some limited allocations by local lawmakers, has gradually decreased, Green said. So he’s turned to private corporate sponsors.

The van program ran full force during the end of then-Mayor David Dinkins’ administration and throughout Rudy Giuliani’s time in office from 1994 to 2001, Green said. Drivers focused on areas where the most 911 calls were being made.

“We know it worked,” Green said.

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