Stemming crime spike

A Brooklyn neighborhood that saw murders double last year amid a citywide drop in homicides has added a dozen new cops to battle the rise in violence, police sources said.

The rookie cops assigned to the 71st Precinct will focus on trouble spots in southern Crown Heights, particularly on the weekends, to stave off shootings, serious assaults and murders. They’ll also concentrate on areas around schools where teen-on-teen crime fueled a 12% spike in robberies last year.

“I come home on the subway from a hard day’s work and there’s gunplay on the step,” said Cyril Miller, 57, a security guard standing on Nostrand Ave. near Sterling St. “It scares the living daylights out of me.”

Murders were up last year from nine to 21, the highest increase of any precinct in the city with more than four homicides in 2004. Six of the slayings were arson deaths.

Those figures bucked a citywide trend in which murders dropped 5.5% to a 42-year low of 540 slayings.

The street violence in the 71st Precinct took a cruel toll on the family of Hyacinth Cespedes, 54, a wheelchair-bound mom who was killed Aug. 29 by a stray bullet as she was being helped into her building on President St.

“She was the center of our family,” said the woman’s daughter, Amanda Harriott, 22, who ran downstairs to find her mother dying. “I won’t be satisfied until the people who killed her are caught.”

Drops in burglaries and auto thefts fueled an overall drop in crime of 2.35% in the 71st Precinct, but even that figure is lower than the citywide decline of just over 5%.

The precinct, which has a population of about 110,000, is a mix of African-Americans, West Indians and Orthodox Jews.

Much of the crime in southern Crown Heights, police and residents say, is divided along economic and racial lines.

Violent crime is more prevalent in the predominantly African-American and West Indian parts of the neighborhood; property crime is more common in the Jewish areas.

“This is like the edge of the Jewish area,” said Zalman Kurinsky, 20, who lives within view of the precinct stationhouse. “I only know about crime from reading it in the paper. I read about things I’ve never seen in my life. I feel safe here.”