Hoops vs. Safety: The Culture of Recreation in Lakewood.
The summer of 2007 will be remembered as a quiet one on Lakewood’s hoop front. Between city government and the Board of Education there is only one outdoor basketball court throughout the city. The shoot-down the hoops strategy to bring order to the courts was due, in part, to neighborhood complaints and nuisance violations. A common complaint issuing forth from the chorus of engaged voices is the lack of security at the hoop sites. Coming from the mouths of bureaucrats and citizens alike, these complaints have, in effect, castrated the courts and rendered recreational assets unproductive of competitive play. For the time being, Lakewood youngsters interested in basketball are forced to seek other extracurricular activities.
While some parents have complained about the lack of basketball courts in Lakewood, the Board of Education is reported to be tailoring a program for local hoopers set to roll out this fall. According to a recent Sun Post article, Board of Education President Linda Beebe states “ the idea would be for a school at one end of town to be open a couple of nights and on the other end of town for a couple of nights.” With this development expected from the schools, city government has decided to uphold the decision to remove the courts from Lakewood and Madison parks.
Citizens in Lakewood and across the region are expressing discomfort with anti-social and criminal behavior erupting from outdoor basketball courts.
What does this really mean to Lakewood? Is Lakewood not safe anymore? Mayor George seems confident in the current strategy of installing video surveillance cameras at city parks. In response to the hoops crisis, Mayor George argued, “The police came to me and recommended elimination of the few basketball hoops we have at Madison Park.” He adds, “Although nothing serious, there had been outbreaks of fighting and numerous curfew violations. The thought was to take action before someone was harmed. Knowing that there are other basketball options within the city (YMCA, indoor at the schools, etc.) made the decision easier.”
As Lakewood enters an era when safety concerns often race across the stressed minds of citizens, city leaders have determined the safest measure available to combat profane language, litter, vandalism, drug dealing and a number of associated anti-social behaviors not constituting criminality is, quite simply, to take down the hoops.
Students don’t often register the deeper context of citizen concern over safety and social order in their thinking about recreation and out-of-bounds behavior. Former basketball player and 2005 LHS graduate Zach Larney, for example, thinks the whole idea of taking down the hoops is absurd. Larney states “This is ridiculous, how can you not have an outdoor basketball court in a city of 50,000 plus. It makes you wonder why kids do the things they do.”
Mike Harrington, a senior football player at LHS argues, “I think it’s sad. What do they expect us to do after school? Not every one can afford the YMCA. You wonder why kids in this city are getting in trouble. We need to give kids more constructive things to do with their time.”
Indeed, kids, especially male adolescents, need constructive outlets for the expansive and sometimes aggressive energies that are part in parcel of human development during puberty and young adulthood.
Some parents are furious with the approach city government has taken. Stephanie Toole, an energetic mother of seven states, “ My two oldest boys drive to Cleveland Heights, North Olmsted, and Westlake, to name just a few cities for courts to play on with all of their other Lakewood friends.” Stephanie’s kids are 06’ and 07’ graduates of LHS who have “spent many hours at the courts at Harding. What a shame they won’t be replacing those courts. They were filled morning till night with kids of all ages.”
In fact, the old basketball “cages” at Harding provided many strategic advantages to those interested in monitoring for safety and the enforcement of community norms on and around Lakewood’s outdoor basketball courts. What better way to monitor basketball players than to consolidate their activities within a caged complex of courts on a main street, in clear view of law enforcement and the community at large. By missing this opportunity to centralize basketball playing in one outdoor area, the Board of Education will be forced to execute more costly, though arguably safer means of monitoring such activities at indoor facilities.
Dr. Ernest Dezolt, an authority on Juvenile Delinquency and an associate professor of sociology at John Carroll University thinks the city should take a long-term approach to craft a sound solution. As Dezolt sees it, “If you want short term results, you take down the hoops. This will give you a short term gain. However, for this to work you must beef up security in other places and create more viable solutions for the displaced kids. On the flip side, the literature and research suggests that more supervised sports will lead to a longer, more successful impact because you are engaging kids in more constructive activities that will foster positive growth in a teenagers development.”
In addition, Dezolt thinks there must be a cultural and social balance to find a more equitable solution for the lack of hoops. “Nothing is static, nothing will stay the same,” Dezolt argues. “If nothing else is done, it will be the wrong answer. There has to be a follow up or the short term decision will turn bad.”
Dezolt thinks the best way to accomplishing this would be to get citizens to “buy in” the Lakewood brand of safe, clean and affordable neighborhoods. Dezolt states, “ Studies show that investing in the community through education, police and civic engagement is a more positive way for Lakewood to live up to its brand.”
Mayoral candidate and Ward II Councilman Ryan Demro thinks taking down the hoops is a telling sign about the state of the city's safety. Demro states, “First of all taking down the hoops is a poor excuse for a crime policy. If you expect to have courts that are safe and playable, we need to have a police presence in the parks.” Additionally, Councilmen Demro articulates, “We are not thinking clearly about recreation and crime and were looking for quick political solutions in order to pacify people who are really interested in long term planning and recreation.”
Another Mayoral candidate echoes the concerns of Councilmen Demro. Ed Fitzgerald, an at-large Councilman pledges, "As Mayor, I intend to increase safety personnel across the city, particularly in our parks. The fact that some of our parks have become havens for criminal activity is not acceptable. Removing recreational equipment from parks is a sign that we are losing control of the situation. I understand it as a short term measure, but it is not a solution to juvenile crime or misbehavior in our parks."
Coincidentally, Tom Bullock, Candidate for the Ward 2 council seat and Ryan Demro are demanding a similar gold standard when it comes to recreation in the ‘Wood. According to Bullock, Toole’s comments have been a hot button issue during front porch conversations as Bullock canvases Ward 2. “No hoops or no supervision is a false choice. Let's have basketball with proper supervision so kids have a safe place to blow off steam in an appropriate way," says Bullock. While the Board of Education has already adopted an indoor-only basketball policy for school grounds that will start this fall, Bullock said city-run parks should find a way to make outdoor basketball work without safety problems, noise, or rude behavior. "This is not an impossible problem to fix," said Bullock. "We can find a way to make it work."
The lack of hoops is for some a telling sign about the state of the city’s well-being and ability to integrate adolescent behavior, energy and play into a quality neighborhood lifestyle. If local residents near the parks and schools complain about the lack of safety, vulgarity and nuisances near their homes, inquiring citizens would like to know if other strategies were considered to address this issue. Was the need for more cops or city workers in the parks or on the streets to patrol these areas considered? When, if ever, will basketball options be made available during the summer months in Lakewood, whether indoor or outdoor?
Harding's outdoor Hoops, the former “Mecca” of outdoor basketball in the ‘Wood will not return following the completion of the new Harding building. Unfortunately, in the short term, this is a stop-gap solution. As a result, the new generation of Lakewood youth will be bottled up in their homes, cut off from opportunity to play sports, and abandoned to self-directed programming with a barrage of corporate media. They will move through adolescence disconnected from the experience of hot summer days on the asphalt, breathing fresh air and burning off aggressive, youthful energy. In Lakewood, words of the late sociologist C. Wright Mills express a fundamental social fact: “We are now at the ending of an epoch, and we have got to work out our own answers.”
In Cleveland, and the surrounding first tier suburbs, basketball hoops have been taken down in response to similar perceived threats to neighborhood safety and civil community norms. National Public Radio recently aired a program entitled Barring Basketball in the Burbs. During the program, Daniel S. Pocek, the Mayor of Bedford Heights, argued “It’s about a lack of values. The fact is that we believe in middle class values in our town and that goes across African American and Caucasian lines. It is this culture of disrespect. If you just talk to these people, it seems as if they don’t respect you or respect each other.”
Pocek states further that many of the behavioral problems associated with basketball and the culture of disrespect come from underlying socio economic problems. “Lets face it,” says Pocek, “What the bottom underlying problem is, is the breakdown of the nuclear American family. Most of the problems occur from one-parent families. The parents are stressed out trying to raise their family, trying to earn a living, trying to buy a house, and they expect more out of the schools.”
Susan Russo, a resident near the deceased Roosevelt courts, called the police “more times in the last year than in the 22 years I have lived here.” Her concerns resonated with Pocek’s culture of disrespect. Russo affirmed “A rather large group of kids would congregate. 50 or so, many of which the neighbors did not recognize as being from our neighborhood.” Russo described an unbearable living situation of destruction to the property and excessive noise, long after 10:00 p.m. on any given night.
In America, and especially in Cleveland, the increase in poverty has created the societal constraints on local school districts wherein educators must play multiple roles. In these times, teachers are expected to play educator, psychologist, sociologist and parent. Moreover, at the same time that Cleveland becomes increasingly gentrified in the Tremont and Ohio City neighborhoods as well as in downtown areas, well paying jobs are being replaced with a patchwork of low paying, unstable service sector jobs. As the deprived groups sometimes prone to anti-socal behavior continue to be driven out of developing neighborhoods only to create new pockets of chaos in suburban neighborhoods, how will Lakewood respond? As the Lakewood Police force becomes increasingly stressed by a growing caseload of socio-economic and psychiatric dysfunction, what is leadership’s response?
Advancing positive changes and good recreational order for youth in the Lakewood landscape will require new approaches and commitments. In Lakewood, where city government seems stuck in the civil service jobs-for-life order of complacency and stagnation, the process of transformation is likely to be a long one. Clearly, we need a more sophisticated way to promote a New Lakewood Century, one that integrates the need for constructive recreational outlets for the energies of our youth, while simultaneously protecting the public good, safe neighborhoods and civil community norms. Lakewood needs to listen carefully to the candidates. Our community must engage our youth pro-actively and firmly in order to protect itself. Otherwise we risk drifting in a city on the cusp of capitulation to the anti-social disorder that breeds a criminal class crisis.