Township of North Bergen, New Jersey

know and care about the community because many of them grew up in North Bergen. The recent crime rate has dropped so low that the police focus more on quality of life issues than criminal activity. They work with municipal staff to ensure residents adhere to property standards, graffiti is cleaned up within 24-48 hours, and they take care of abandoned properties to ensure there is no property damage and to improve the aesthetics of the community. Fasilis believes in a preventive crime method, partly due to the broken windows theory. He explains, “If you have one factory with a broken window in it, if you don’t fix it, somebody else is going to come by, see that nobody cares about the building and they are going to throw another rock at it. And you’re going to have more broken windows. Then it’s going to turn into graffiti, and then it turns into a nuisance property, and then it’s going to be a crime generator. So, we really moved away from traditional policing quite a bit over the past several years because the www.jnatoli.com I NTE G R ITY / E XPE RTI S E / PE R FO RMAN C E Proud Builders of the North Bergen Community Center & Library