To: i-node who wrote (714379 ) 5/9/2013 11:57:45 PM From: tejek Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 1584048 Cleveland Home Reminds Us Some Police Don't Rush to Poor Neighborhoods Neighbors Detail Horrors and Police Negligence at Ohio Kidnapping Home People from the Cleveland neighborhood in which three kidnapped women were recovered on Monday said that they'd been calling the cops on the suspected abductor for years, only to have police ignore them. It seemed hard to believe. The Cleveland Police Department itself disputes the claims, saying its records indicate officers had only visited the Seymour Avenue residence twice before this week: Once to respond to a street fight that Ariel Castro, the lead kidnapping suspect, had called in himself, and once to investigate allegations that Castro had briefly abducted a little boy while working as a bus driver in 2004 (when police went to the house to investigate, nobody looked to be home, so they left). At least one neighbor maintained in an interview with MSNBC on Tuesday that the police are wrong. Israel Lugo says he called police about the Castro home in 2011 when his sister saw a woman with a baby banging on one of the house's windows as if she were trying to escape. Memories and police records can both be spotty. But the prospect of cops overlooking alarming stories for so long is not unusual one. How could it happen? The people who live around Ariel Castro's house, like Castro himself, are poor. And the police don't patrol poor neighborhoods the way they do wealthier ones. The Cleveland zip code in which the kidnapped women were found—44113—has a median income of about $23,000 , nearly $18,000 less than the Ohio average. Almost 37 percent of the residents in 44113 live below the poverty line, and more than a quarter of its households bring in less than $10,000 in income annually . Ariel Castro purchased the Seymour Avenue home in which the women were held for a scant $12,000 in 1992. Today the house is worth $36,000, but Castro owes $2,500 in back taxes on it. News reports say the home was in bad shape and had plastic bags covering the windows, but that wasn't cause for concern on a street blighted by abandoned homes. Read more................