Twenty-eight years ago, when I bought the house I live in here on Staten Island - in Stapleton, an integrated, economically declining, working- to middle-class neighborhood on the North Shore - none of its windows were barred. The front door was glass and wood. Nobody on the block bothered to lock their front doors, much less the back ones.

Things stayed that way till the mid- to late 1980s. Then, in 1989, a girlfriend of mine who parked her car around the corner on Court Street overnight had her passenger-side window smashed in and the interior looted. That seemed to signal a transition. From then on, I saw the distinctive glitter of car-window glass on that stretch of street regularly.

In the five or so years that followed I was successfully burgled three times, once while my son was asleep upstairs; had one thief caught in the act, thanks to my watchful neighbors; had my car stolen once (recovered quickly and undamaged, thanks again to the neighbors); and found evidence of attempted break-ins four more times. I’ve never felt afraid anywhere on the streets of Staten Island, but as someone living in what statistics said was the borough lowest in all forms of crime it sure felt to me that I was caught up in the nightmlare of a local crime wave that I couldn’t help but take personally.

As a result, I installed a burglar-alarm system. There are now protective bars on all the ground-floor and basement windows, and on the terrace door; a wrought-iron gate secures the basement door. My front door and terrace door are metal-clad and double-locked. They are always kept locked. One particularly vulnerable sunporch lined with windows is protected by a second burglar alarm. Along the line I replaced much of my hurricane fencing, and raised it a foot in height as I did so. Around 1995 I found myself coming home from even the shortest trip or errand prepared to find the place infiltrated, and, to my consternation, started considering the judicious application of razor wire – that grim symbol of self-protective desperation – to marginally accessible sections of the second-floor roof.

Living in constant fear of violence and lawlessness is everybody’s bad dream. The causes for these crimes and my defensive responses to them are no doubt complex, surely including the depradations of capitalism, the increasing gap between rich and poor, the dissolution of the social safety net, and systemic racism. More proximate, however, is the methadone clinic three blocks away, in favor of which I argued publicly fifteen years ago, to the displeasure of my NIMBY-oriented neighbors. (I believed then, and believe now, that our community needs a drug-rehab clinic; I just wish it included a needle-exchange program, proven world-wide to decrease disease transmission among users.) And closer still were the dozens of empty crack vials and envelopes, even hypodermic needles, that I could pick up on my daily round of errands in the neighborhood just a few years ago.

Cocaine, especially crack cocaine, has had its transformative effect on my community, as it has on every community in this country that it’s touched - which is virtually every community in this country. I don’t think that plague is over and done with, not by a long shot. Yet I agree fully with the recent reports of dramatic and welcome decreases in crime city-wide.

I have to report that, based experientially on the diagnostic symptoms available to me, crime and its immediate causes in this community are receding at a steady rate. I haven’t seen a discarded crack vial or miniature zip-lock bag or hypodermic on the street for a year. Neither I nor any of my neighbors has been burgled, successfully or otherwise, for even longer. Cars park safely once again on Court Street. The only thing I’m missing recently is a stainless-steel frame for an exercise cycle that I had sitting on my front stoop as a symbolic guard dog; someone else with an eye for "found" sculpture apparently decided to help him- or herself to it, and, though I regret its departure, since it was a street find to start with I haven’t lost anything out of pocket. Indeed, aside from wishing they paid more attention to the litter and pooper-scooper laws, I haven’t any gripes at all right now against those who pass through or share this neighborhood.

I still haven’t entirely gotten over my anxieties, or my suspicions. Last fall, trudging up the hill from the bus stop at Beach and Van Duzer and rounding the corner onto my block, I saw some residents of the apartment complex across the street from me standing on their lawn, talking excitedly and pointing at my house. Assuming the worst, I hurried over to them, and one of them said, in Spanish, something to the effect that I needed to be careful because my house was in danger. A thief, I asked? Did you call the cops?

No, they laughed, not a thief – at least not a human one. Following an outstretched finger, I saw a raccoon, trying to get into my attic skylight, which was slightly ajar and, fortunately, protected by a screen. I could see the critter poking futilely through the narrow opening. That explained the pattering I’d heard from time on the roof while working in my attic office, a sound I’d assumed came from birds. Seems I’ll have to trim the birches I planted in 1970; they’ve grown so high that they now provide access to the house’s third floor for these persistent little scavengers.

That’s the kind of threat to my security I’m prepared to handle. I don’t plan to take down my window bars, or leave my front door unlocked when I’m away ever again. But maybe we’ve begun to wake up from that bad dream and it’s coming back to being just quiet, low-key, safe-as-houses Staten Island again, even here in Stapleton.