For weeks now, I’ve been living through the surreal experience of waking up and heading out to the local dry cleaners, pharmacy, bodega, and subway stop in what recent headlines suggest is the most dangerously violent place in New York. It sure doesn’t feel that way in Crown Heights. But that might be because we’ve been through these spasms of horror before.

My friends, family, and neighbors are combating a sudden, shocking spike in street violence in more or less the same way we dealt with blizzards, blackouts, water main breaks, or the COVID pandemic: singly and in groups, people emerge from their homes to chat, check on each other and do the small, meaningful acts of care that make the neighborhood safer.

That might mean shoveling the walk for one of the seniors, or treating local youngsters to pizza as a favor to their overwhelmed single mom, or stopping the flow of rumors by spreading accurate, official information about crime in the neighborhood. It might not seem like much, but over the course of 40 years in the neighborhood, I’ve seen the effort pay off.

In the late 1990s, several block association presidents and merchants met month after month and quietly pointed out the drug spots and dealers to the local precinct, who gradually began clearing them off the corners. And starting in 2006, continuing for more than a decade, we held marches, rallies and prayer vigils after the strangled body of 16-year-old Chanel Petro-Nixon was found just outside of Brower Park. Chanel’s suspected killer, Veron Primus, has been indicted in absentia; he is currently imprisoned in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, where he was convicted of murdering a woman years after being deported from the U.S.

A few years ago, when a spate of........

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