105th precinct / population 188,582
Situated on the eastern edge of Queens, the neighborhoods of Queens Village, Bellerose, Rosedale and Springfield Gardens make up a large, diverse area that cuts through a number of middle-class communities that share a border with Long Island's Nassau County. The neighborhood's size — the 105th Precinct, which covers the area, is the largest in the city — has skewed crime statistics, and for three decades the southern communities of Rosedale and Springfield Gardens have beseeched the city to create a new precinct that could cut police response times and increase safety.
Plagued by response times that were 15 percent longer than those of any other neighborhood in the precinct, and 33 percent longer than the rest of the city's, these neighborhoods were in desperate need of help. So, in 2007, the city established a satellite precinct on North Conduit Avenue. Crime dropped 8 percent the following year. In 2010, the 105th Precinct enjoyed one of the lowest major crime rates per capita in the city. In DNAinfo.com's Crime & Safety Report, Queens Village and its neighbors rank 17th safest.
In the 1990s, the police made great strides toward reducing danger in these neighborhoods of mainly single-family homes. The percentage reductions in major index crimes after the crack epidemic, however, were not as great as those in other neighborhoods.
For instance, murder fell 35 percent from 1993 to 2010, compared with a 54 percent drop overall in Patrol Borough Queens South, which includes several nearby precincts.
The 15 murders in 2010 represented nearly a quarter of those in Queens South for that year. The figure also represented a 67 percent increase in killings over the prior two years. The spike in violence, which in 2010 also included a jump of 14 percent in felony assaults, to 270, and a 6 percent jump in auto thefts, to 393, had these communities on edge.
67%
Increase in murders from 2009 to 2010
54%
Drop in rapes from 1993 to 2010
Cop Robbed and Killed by Date She Met at Nightclub
Police officer Milagros T. Johnson was gunned down after a date, and her body was dumped in a Rosedale marsh. The 25-year-old cop wrapped up her work for the day at the 109th Precinct, in Flushing, late on Nov. 10, 1992, and headed with colleagues to Nobody's Pub, on Northern Boulevard. Not long after midnight she left alone, returned home, changed clothes and went back out for a drive. She then met ex-con Kwame Jackson outside a Flushing nightclub and went with her new date to a friend's home in St. Albans. Around 2:30 a.m., after a brief sexual encounter, they returned to her parked car, on 204th Street, and Jackson shot her three times in the head and robbed her, taking her .38-caliber service revolver and some cash. Her body was found later that day by a jogger in a marshy lot at Craft Avenue and Huxley Street, near Kennedy Airport, in Rosedale. Her Nissan Pathfinder, with a bloodstained driver's seat, was found abandoned in East New York. Jackson was arrested days later, when he was overheard bragging about the killing. The murder weapon was found in a sewer in South Jamaica, a couple of blocks from the house where Jackson was staying with his sister. He was later convicted of the murder.
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