By Patrick McGroarty
Reporter Staff

When Franklin Miller and his wife Rita were looking to purchase a home in 2002, some of the houses on their final list bore addresses on Norton Street and Wendover Street, blocks more often associated with tragic crimes than homeowners' bargains.

"We're not rich. The reality is we had to buy a home where we could afford it," says Miller from inside the offices of the Dorchester Bay Economic Development Corporation, where he works as a youth and community organizer. "But that doesn't mean you have to be okay with what's happening there."

Miller and his wife eventually settled on a two-family home on Wendover Street. Before he closed the deal, Miller persuaded his close friend Elias Monteiro, a Dorchester Bay EDC colleague and fellow Wendover Street resident, to make a deal: Miller would move onto the block if Monteiro would stay for at least a year while the new residents got a feel for the neighborhood.

Monteiro ended up staying for three years and helping Miller start a crime watch in late 2002.

Last week, during a National Night Out ceremony at Fenway Park, Boston Mayor Thomas Menino and acting Police Superintendent Albert Goslin honored Miller as "Crime Fighter of the Year" for his work on the Wendover Street Crime Watch. He was cited for his "selfless contributions to his street, neighborhood, and city."

Miller says the watch's activity has ebbed and flowed in the past four years, from stretches where membership was effectively limited to him and his wife to some notable accomplishments, particularly after the tragic death of Matt Mendes in May of this year.

Several days after Mendes was murdered, Miller called a special meeting of the crime watch. When a candlelight vigil in Mendes's memory was scheduled for the same evening, the meeting was delayed, and Miller admits to being torn by the decision.

"We can't just mourn the fact that he's dead. We have to take action that will cease the problem," he said.

That blend of realism and optimism, a philosophy that Miller credits in part to his need to deal with his mother's death when he was 16, is behind his success as a crime-fighter. He says that rather than confront residents with the negative things happening on their street, he started by accentuating the positive: organizing block parties, urging people to take ownership for the cleanliness of their own block. Next came pressure on police and city officials to deal with the loiterers and suspected drug dealers. After Mendes's death, Miller and his fellow residents told the police that loiterers and drivers pulling off Dudley Street and speeding down Wendover were intimidating residents to the point where some avoided coming down their own block. Within a week, police and the Department of Transportation had changed the direction of traffic flow on the street.

"It's certainly the fastest I've seen any city mechanism work," said Miller. "I think when the neighborhood came to the police, for us to give them input, it showed that someone here really cared what happened."

By coincidence, residents of one of the other streets where Miller had considered living were honored when the BPD named the Norton Street Crime Watch one of Boston's top-ten for 2006 during a ceremony at the John Hancock Conference Center on July 31. Linda Barros, a Hamilton Street resident, has been the decade-old watch's point person for the last two years. She, like Miller, says that shortly after she moved in, she began looking for a pro-active solutions to issues blighting her neighborhood from trash on the street to violent crime. While the watch has about 15 active members, Barros says interest grows when a particularly challenging issue arises, as it did last year when several early-rising residents began to notice a young female prostitute working from a van parked in front of an apartment she was renting on Norton Street.

"Every Sunday morning a neighbor would be on her way to church when she would see this woman getting into the van with customers," said Barros. "We started calling it the 'ho van.'"

Barros and other crime watch members alerted the tenant's absentee landlord, who eventually evicted all three of his occupants and sold the unit. "We have some real characters in this neighborhood," said Barros.

While unsightly garbage first stoked her passion for change and solutions, the crime watch has also confronted more challenging concerns. "We've had a lot of sad incidents, a lot of homicides," she said. "A lot of the people we used to see out on the street are not anymore, because they have been murdered."

Most recently, Barros said her group has discussed the many street memorials in the Bowdoin-Geneva area, and sought an alternative to the flowers that fade and markers that draw crowds months after a person was murdered.

"We need people to know that they can always get involved," she said. "If I can't take care of myself, who's gonna do it for me?"