PARK SLOPE, BROOKLYN — It seems that the Park Slope Panthers are officially no longer with us.
“Bottom line is there is no Park Slope Panthers,” Park Slope resident and group founder Kristian Nammack said in an email to Patch.
The group was started as a neighborhood-watch type organization in the wake of the brutal killing of a beloved pet dog named Moose.
But the group has ended as quickly as it started.
“It was a concept,” Nammack said, “I was probably too eager to set up a name and logo before doing the research.”
The group’s first meeting ended up being, to some people’s delight, an archetype of both the difficulties in starting a community group and what it must be to live in Park Slope.
Instead of discussing ways to improve park safety, the “discussion ended up being all over the place,” Nammack wrote, “as you likely read by the two bloggers who infiltrated our meeting.”
Hell Gate reporter Esther Wang first chronicled the meeting, writing that, despite tensions and disagreements during the meeting, the people Nammack brought together shared a frustration with the safety provided by the NYPD, “even if the alternatives were still unclear, or insufficient.”
“I intended our meeting in the park a few weeks ago to be an exploratory brainstorming session of what a neighborhood watch would look like,” Nammack said. He did some preliminary research and encouraged anyone interested in meeting up to do the same.
A neighborhood watch, Nammack has since learned, might be more of a time commitment than he’s able to take on, requiring “lots of time, admin, volunteer outreach, etc,” he wrote. While he still feels a neighborhood watch is “sorely needed,” he said his volunteer time is already stretched thin, “and I certainly don’t have time to organize this.”
Others in the neighborhood agree, with one resident even making a call for city council participatory budget monies to be spent on park cameras to easily track people like "the criminal who recently assaulted a woman and killed her dog in Prospect Park."
Instead, Nammack says he is resolved to “find simpler ways” to help improve park safety, “specifically to help early morning dog walkers, often women, who seem to be the target of this violent sociopath.”
Ultimately, Nammack said, it is up to the NYPD to find Moose’s killer. Police were unable to provide an update to the case.
“I have no interest in playing cop and never did,” Nammack said.
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