Wire ban lures thieves, critics say

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NEWARK, N.J. (AP) | Some business owners in this crime-plagued city say recent enforcement of a decades-old ordinance prohibiting some types of barbed wire and razor wire is making Newark more attractive - to thieves.

Burglaries are up 17 percent from 2007 through November in Newark, which has a young, charismatic mayor who has vowed to help the city rebound from decades of official inaction, incompetence and outright criminality.

The city is aggressively courting new investment and development, but people who have been ordered to downgrade their fences say officials are worried more about aesthetics than security.

John DeSantis, owner of a lot used by an auto-repair business in Newark's West Ward, says his property has been the site of more than a dozen burglaries since the summer, when the city forced him to remove razor wire on top of the 7-foot fence that surrounds the lot.

“The bottom line was, they said, 'It doesn't look good and we want to create a new image for the city of Newark,'” Mr. DeSantis said.

The order was backed up by a previously little-used 1966 ordinance that states: “No barbed wire fence or other fence or wall having barbed or sharp projections facing outward, or otherwise endangering the traveling public, shall be permitted adjacent to or along the line of any street or public place.”

The Rev. C.H. Thomas of the Church of Christ, which sits across the street from Mr. DeSantis' lot, told the Star-Ledger of Newark that thieves have broken into several cars in the church's lot since barbed wire was removed from a fence over the summer at the city's behest.

In some respects, the dispute is a microcosm of the changes under way in New Jersey's largest city, viewed, as always, through the prism of crime.

Newark is a city struggling to forge ahead as it grapples with its past, with neighborhoods in which new housing is sprinkled across a landscape teeming with aging or abandoned properties.

Crime remains the broad brush that colors perceptions of the city: Despite a steep drop in homicides in the last year, robberies and aggravated assaults rose along with burglaries in 2008.