Residents say squatters are terrorizing their Brooklyn neighborhood
NEW YORK -- New video shows alleged squatters wreaking havoc on a Brooklyn neighborhood, destroying property and sneaking through fences.
CBS New York spoke to neighbors on Monday in Dyker Heights who say the police appear powerless to help.
The property on 67th Street looks like the worst yard sale you've ever seen, including dirty dishware and idle ATMs. Neighbors said it has been like that for months, ever since a group of squatters moved in.
"We feel unsafe," Brian Liu said.
Last summer, surveillance video caught one of the alleged squatters destroying a neighbor's security camera with a piece of plywood. A few months later, another neighbor caught them stealing water from her hose through a hole in the fence.
"I saw the hose that was connected to my water fountain to that side there and I disconnected that," Antoinette Raffaele said.
But they kept going down the block.
"They turn on the water and use the garbage bins, steal from us and then go to them. After we locked the gates, they went to my neighbor and steal the water over there," Liu said.
The situation intensified in November when the house caught fire. Police arrested 46-year-old Cheng Chen for arson and criminal trespassing.
But that was just the first of three fires at this house, including one as recently as last month.
"The police came. They cannot do nothing, they said," Raffaele said.
CBS New York spoke to the property owner off camera. He said he moved out of the house a couple years ago to renovate it with the hopes of moving back in. He said he's still paying $6,000 per month on the mortgage and the fires have caused $900,000 in damages.
"I have an empty apartment upstairs. I don't know if they can come through the back and decide to squat in my apartment, too," Raffaele said.
Now that the house is boarded up, the owner says he doesn't know how often the squatters are there or when they'll come back.
"You have to prove you live there for 30 days and then police cannot ... they claim it's theirs. What's police gonna do?" City Councilwoman Susan Zhuang said.
Since squatting is a civil matter and hard to criminally prosecute, there is no recorded data of how big of a problem it actually is. Zhuang is crafting a bill to change that.
"Try to and get city agencies like the NYPD to collect that data when people report because a squatter causes an issue, we should have this data collected and do further analysis," Zhuang said.
Until then, she and many of the neighbors are urging the state Legislature to re-examine New York's rights for squatters.