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Audelia Creek. He’s on the hook for more security lighting, lots of warning signs, keeping his tenants’ front windows unobstructed from view, hosting quarterly public crime watch forums for everybody in the area, and a lot of monthly reporting on how it’s all going.

The verdict is that the campaign is producing results, so far.

“Since the agreement was signed, there has been a decrease in the amount of abatable offenses and crime occurring at the property,” Kramer said in an email. “The city remains hopeful that the owner’s representative(s) will work with the city to take reasonable steps to prevent crimes from occurring at their property.”

There are far fewer dubious characters hanging around Bent Creek these days. At the December public forum, police showcased the before-and-after crime statistics. Comparing July through November 2016 with the same six months in 2017, robberies of individuals were down from eight to three. Car burglaries went down from 17 to 10, and home burglaries dropped from 19 to six.

The police stats did not mention the crime you hear about most at Bent Creek — bold, open-air drug dealing.

“That’s what causes the gunshots,” explains businessowner Lauren. Her neighbor Lia Berhe says that during worse times, she typically saw more than 20 drug deals a day in the parking lot, where dealers openly counted wads of cash. An online search of DPD offense reports suggests that almost nobody is calling police about drug dealing at the center. In the July through November of 2017, records show only three drug arrests in the entire neighborhood that police know as Beat 256. In 2016, there were four drug arrests, three of them in Bent Creek. Two of those arrests were at EZ Trip. The third was at American Dollar Store. All of the arrests were for possession of less than 2-ounces of marijuana.

Khanani and his associates bought

Bent Creek in 2015, and he says the experience has been all new.

“I have never ever had these kinds of issues in our business in the past. I had never even imagined investors could have a problem like this, and the financial burden that comes along with it,” he told the Advocate via email. “We spend approximately $23,000 monthly on off-duty police officer pay, which is way in excess of our monthly base rent income on the property.”

He says he cannot keep up that level of spending. He claims that since March 2017 he has spent nearly $130,000 on the extra security, plus legal expenses.

If Khanani does not convince the city that his corporation is committed to keeping the place more secure for the long haul, they will go to trial this month. That would put Khanani in a bad place. Should the judge decide the shopping center is a public nuisance, the city could go so far as to shut it down for one year. Khanani would still be responsible for keeping the vermin at bay or the city could shut off his utilities and yank his certificate of occupancy. Moreover, trying to sell a property that has been branded a public nuisance would be difficult at best.

At the heart of it looms a tough question. Whose responsibility is it to keep a business safe — the property owner or the police? Khanani believes the city is forcing him to shoulder more than his fair share of the burden. Where is the line?

Professor Mary Spector of SMU’s Dedman School of Law writes and speaks on the topic of landlord-tenant law. She says, “That line is one of the most difficult ones to draw.”

While she has not studied this case intimately, she thinks both sides have legitimate points of view.

“The problem that the property owner here has is a legitimate one. He’s paying a bunch of money to comply,” Spector says. “He’s wondering, why does he have to bear the burden? He’s paying commercial taxes that [he believes] should be paying for that kind of stuff.”

It may be hard for a property owner to think of money he spends on extra security as an investment, but that is how she sees it in this case. “The law requires property owners to take certain steps to protect it themselves. Sometimes those steps require more investment than others do. It’s not always fair.”

It Takes A Neighborhood

One person after another calls District 10 City Councilman Adam McGough to complain about the Forest and Audelia crossroads. He says there are many organizations and neighbors who “have Google Maps drawn to show how to get to their house without driving through that intersection.”

The frequency of robberies, burglaries and theft has dipped and you see only a fraction of the loiterers who once crowded the Bent Creek parking lot. That encourages McGough, though he believes it will be a marathon. He is an evangelist for the Community Prosecutor concept. It is

Churchill

a multi-disciplinary team of lawyers and enforcement officers, looking for full-neighborhood solutions that are both creative and holistic. It takes a lot more than just running the smalltime dealers out of one strip center.

McGough predicts, “The people will show up and take action to improve their own neighborhoods if they believe that they’re supported, that there’s someone who’s listening to them and who is going to help. That’s what community prosecution is all about.”

The freshly minted North Lake Highlands Public Improvement District (PID) encourages him, too. The two-person team’s budget comes from assessments made to business property owners in this new target zone. It is not a tax – the assessment was approved by owners accounting for at least 60 percent of the property value in the zone. The narrow district extends nearly as far as Richland College to the northwest, and southeast to LBJ’s intersection with Miller Road. It includes Bent Creek and a sprawling passel of apartment complexes.

Kathy Stewart is executive director, and will not need much ramp-up time. She has been running the successful Lake Highlands PID for four years. She will use 60 percent of the northern PID’s expected $339,000 budget to pay for “enhanced” two-person police patrol teams. These teams will have a mandate to get out of the car and walk into every business on a regular basis. The PID puts extra weight on developing relations with management of the many apartment buildings.

“You just start talking and it’s amazing who starts listening and you just start trying to pull all those resources together,” Stewart says.

When Stewart looked at Forest and Audelia, she saw a woeful lack of important support systems. “There really were very few public or private resources working with that neighborhood. There’s not a library, there’s not a rec center, there’s not a park. There’s not even a church in the immediate Forest and Audelia area.”

McGough recently opened the new North Lake Highlands Youth Boxing Gym to give teens a healthy outlet, and Stewart wants to lure many more resources that do something good for quality of life of local residents.

And then there’s that sea of apart- ment complexes, often owned by outof-state investors. The block adjacent to Khanani’s Bent Creek Shopping Center is packed with multiple complexes. They keep police far more occupied than does the strip center. Over the last two years, police have been summoned to that single block of apartments for 26 home burglaries, 33 thefts (including 13 stolen cars), nine aggravated assaults and a slew of lesser crimes. The difference is that you don’t see the criminal activity from the street when you drive by.

McGough was disappointed at the low turnout at Khanani’s December crime watch meeting; only a dozen people showed up, including the organizers and speakers. Nobody came from any of the apartment complexes. Khanani was frustrated, too.

“I always extend an invitation to the retail businesses, HOAs, apartment complexes, DPD, the City of Dallas lawyers and all other neighbors,” he says. “I am not sure why [the apartment managers] do not participate.”

McGough is confident it is some- thing the PID can help with. “I think you’re going to have more interaction between the apartment managers and owners,” he says. “That’s always been part of the problem.”

McGough says the benefits go both ways, citing the example of a troublesome tenant evicted from one apartment who then moves into another complex across the street. When complex managers communicate, they “can start eliminating some of that.”

In his role as chairman of the City

Council’s Public Safety Committee, McGough has plenty of experience in trying to turn around troubled neighborhoods. He says he runs into the same kind of obstacles over and over.

“It’s the one or two properties — sometimes business, sometimes residential — that become the weeds amongst the rest of the neighborhood.”

He doesn’t believe Khanani purposely allowed crime to flourish at Bent Creek, though he thinks the owner has been “negligent” in the past.

“There are business owners across our city who are very, very skilled at pulling the right people together and walking the property and talking to the other business owners, taking the lead on these things,” McGough says. “I don’t see that in Mr. Khanani yet, but I see a willingness.”

McGough pauses, thinking of what causes neighborhoods to corrode. “The reason neighborhoods get to be dangerous is when people acquiesce. It’s this passive acceptance of, ‘OK, that’s just how it is here,’ and we can’t accept that.”