The Elderly: Prisoners of Fear

When they go out--if they go out --they listen anxiously for the sound of footsteps hurrying near, and they eye every approaching stranger with suspicion. As they walk, some may clutch a police whistle in their hands. More often, especially after the sun sets, they stay at home, their world reduced to the confines of apartments that they turn into fortresses with locks and bars on every window and door. They are the elderly who live in the slums of the nation's major cities. Many are poor. White or black, they share a common fear--that they will be attacked, tortured or murdered by the teen-age hoodlums who have coolly singled out old people as the easiest marks in town. Except in a few cases, police statisticians do not have a separate category for crimes against the elderly. But law-enforcement officials across the nation are afraid that such crimes may be growing in number and becoming more vicious in nature. TIME correspondents surveyed the plight of the elderly in three cities. Their reports:

NEW YORK: Charlie's Anguish. The couple inched painfully from Fordham Road into a wasteland of The Bronx. Clinging to each other for support, the old man and woman mounted a curb and struggled for a moment while she regained her balance. Then, slowly, they went on. Watching them shuffle into the shadows of late afternoon, Detective Donald Gaffney sighed heavily and said, "There goes prime meat."

In other rundown sections all over New York City, the elderly are indeed prime targets. Their chief tormentors are young thugs, who have even mugged a 103-year-old woman, stealing from her a couple of dollars' worth of groceries. In Gaffney's district, about 97% of the offenders are black, and 95% of the victims are white women--usually Jews who have stubbornly stayed on in once comfortable apartments while the neighborhood deteriorated around them. "Fagin wouldn't last up here for half an hour," said Gaffney. "He'd be calling us."

The blacks prey primarily on the whites not for racial reasons but because they are convinced that the old people have money stashed away somewhere --hidden in old shoe boxes, tucked under mattresses. The young hoods operate in raiding teams of three or four, or as many as ten. Typically, they have a morning "shape-up" in a local schoolyard to plan what they call a "crib job," because it is as easy as taking money from a baby.

The team will send its youngest, most innocent-looking member, often an eleven-or twelve-year-old, into a bank to spot a likely victim: a woman, say, who is cashing a money order or a Social Security check. When she leaves the building, only one member of the gang will follow her closely so as not to arouse her suspicions. The others trail far behind. When she gets into the elevator in her apartment house, two or three will catch up and board it with her and get off at the floor below hers. Then, as she unlocks her door, they will suddenly appear in the corridor and shove her inside the apartment.

If threats do not succeed in producing valuables, one member of the gang will beat her--often someone under the age of 16 and thus a juvenile in the eyes of the law. The rights of juveniles are so well protected that it is next to impossible to send them away for any length of time. About 75% of the juveniles apprehended in The Bronx and brought into family court have been arrested before and let go, frequently several times over. Knowing how weak the laws are, many elderly victims refuse to prosecute their attackers, fearing that the hoodlums will soon be back on the street and might pay them a second and even more vicious call.

As a result, old people--black and white alike--live like prisoners in the decaying sections of the city. One woman was even afraid to put out her trash; she stuffed it in plastic bags, which she stored in a spare room. When one room would fill up, she would seal it off and start filling up another. At times she lived on candy bars, tossing coins out of a window to children who would go to the store for her. Visiting The Bronx, a reporter from the New York Times talked to Clara Engelmann, 64, who had moved her bed into the foyer of her apartment and slept fully dressed so she could dash out the door the next time someone tried to break into her bedroom --which had happened three times before. "They're not human," she cried. "They're not human."

To try to cope with the special problems of the elderly, New York police have set up senior citizen robbery units in all five boroughs. One of the units' main jobs is to persuade old people to bring charges against their attackers. The police make special arrangements to eliminate the tedium and confusion of court appearances. Detectives also lecture groups of old people on how to survive in the city (e.g., don't go home if you think you're being followed--find a cop). In addition, the police have created a few "safe corridors" for the elderly: thoroughfares in shopping districts that are heavily patrolled. Civic-minded youths, mostly high school students, have helped further by volunteering to escort old people to stores and social clubs.

The police are convinced that some progress is being made; but it is painfully slow. So far this year, although some 600 apartment robberies have been investigated in The Bronx, only 82 arrests have been made. Voluntary agencies do what they can to ease the plight of the elderly, but the scope of the problem is overwhelming.

TIME Correspondent Mary Cronin last week paid a visit to the victim of one of the hundreds of robberies that are still unsolved. Charles Bertsch, 87, is a huge, hearty man who lives with a dozen cats in a cluttered Bronx basement apartment that he has occupied since 1911. The once prosperous neighborhood is now an age-blackened slum of begrimed apartment buildings lining rubbish-choked streets.

One morning Bertsch opened the door to let out Peggy, his dog, for her regular 10 a.m. walk. Says he: "The next thing I knew, I was here on the floor. Eight Puerto Ricans piled in and started hitting me with broom handles. They hit poor Peggy on the head with a hammer. They picked through this drawer and found $60 worth of quarters. Then one of them bent over me with a knife, holding it to my throat. 'Shall I kill him now?' he asked another guy. And the other guy said, 'No, the boss doesn't want him hurt.' "

They left Bertsch on the floor, his cats meowing around him. "Peggy was washing my face with her tongue," he recalls. It was 6 p.m. before he was able to struggle to his feet.

Now Charlie Bertsch, no longer so hearty and outgoing, has turned his place into a fortress. The day after the attack, Detective Gaffney came over with a load of plywood and, at Bertsch's request, nailed up all the windows. "That'll keep people from throwing fire bombs in," said Bertsch. He rarely goes out, getting food deliveries from a delicatessen, paying by check. Next year, he says, he plans to move. "There is no law here," said Charlie Bertsch. "I'm even afraid for the police."

CHICAGO: "Where Can I Live?" On the South Side, old people in the ancient apartment buildings look out of their windows early in the month, when the Social Security checks are arriving, and see the knots of young toughs keeping watch. On the West Side, gatherings of the elderly break up by 4 p.m. so that everyone can get home before dark. Walter Bishop, 72, a retired dry-cleaning worker, remembers how "on nice days and nights we used to take strolls and walks and things. Now I wouldn't go anywhere without a car. And after dark I don't go any place."

According to a recent survey by the Chicago Planning Council on Aging, 41% of the city's 518,000 residents over 60 feel that crime is their most serious concern. "Statistically speaking," says Robert J. Ahrens, director of the Mayor's office for senior citizens, "the elderly aren't victims of crime more often than other age groups. But the effects are much more severe. If a young woman is knocked down during a purse snatching, she gets up with a few bruises. If an 80-year-old woman is knocked down, she could suffer a broken hip, have to enter a nursing home, and risk losing her independence."

That is exactly what happened to one 72-year-old woman. A year ago, neighbors found her lying in her bathtub, blood clotted on her head, a stocking twisted around her neck, and her arms trussed behind her. She had lain there for two days. The next day, the doctors amputated one arm; recently they had to remove the other.

Some elderly people fight back. Not long ago, Gertrude Booker, 75, wrestled a husky teen-age purse snatcher to the ground before she decided that her pocketbook, which contained only bus fare, really was not worth fighting for. Jane Gilbert, 70, has taken karate lessons, and is determined to go out after dark, although she has been held up twice.

The residents of a public-housing project in a decaying area known as "Uptown" live under siege. Like combat soldiers, they recount story after story of how their friends have fallen victim to attacks: a deaf woman in her 90s who was mugged and cut on her forehead, another neighbor who broke a hip when she was knocked to the ground. Ann Lewis, 77, a spirited white-haired widow, was recently knocked down right in front of the main entrance to the project by two twelve-year-olds and dragged by her purse strap. "The fright has gone to my stomach," she said. "I'm scared. But I can't afford to live any place else. Tell me, where can I go? Where can I live?" )

OAKLAND: The 17-c- Slaying. At first glance, everything looks quite normal. The rows of frame or stucco houses are cheerfully painted, the hedges neatly trimmed, the yards well kept, the whole neighborhood clean and tidy in the warm afternoon sun. But where are all the people? The streets are virtually deserted, the blinds drawn, the casement windows fortified with heavy iron gates. The section is an enclave in the slums of East Oakland, and the houses, owned mostly by elderly retirees, are preyed upon by teen-age thugs.

There is no explaining the cruelty of some attacks. Hildur Archibald, 91, probably did not see well enough to identify the assailant who invaded her home in July, and she surely did not have enough strength to resist. She was found lying on the floor of her bedroom, dead of multiple knife wounds. Robbery was the apparent motive, yet police confess they are not sure what was taken.

Elsie Mclntosh, 72, was walking beside her apartment building last month when a 16-year-old boy ran past and grabbed her purse. She was knocked to the ground, injuring her head. Four hours later she was dead. Her pocketbook had contained 17-c-.

By dogged work, Oakland police have managed to put away a score of the members of one black gang, Wolf-pack I, that systematically terrorized East Oakland's residents last winter. But most of the dozen or so raiders who were under the age of 18 when they were convicted will probably be back on the street within a few weeks, because of relatively light sentences.

"It's a sad commentary that the only way of stopping crime is locking up the offenders," says Howard Janssen, 33, a deputy district attorney of Alameda County. "But there are now only two solutions: letting them run wild and hurt more people, or locking them up." Given that choice, the elderly in Oakland--and other major cities--would have no trouble picking the solution.

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