Residents say that five bars in a quarter-mile stretch of Storer Avenue have driven people away and brought violence and drugs to their streets every weekend. Forming a block club, they agree, might be their last and best chance at reclaiming their neighborhood.

Two community-relations representatives from the city and two police officers greet the group. Several children watch as their parents take turns shouting at police, who say the department is stretched so thin that only one squad car is assigned to the area at any given time.

"All we need is a police car there for four hours,'' resident Antonio Arroyo tells the officers. "What's four hours compared to a life? I don't got flak jackets for my family. We're living in the center of hell, man! Is it going to take a bullet in a kid's head for everybody to wake up?''

What is it going to take? We have heard the question asked in dozens of ways, in every Cleveland neighborhood, during the last five months, while a team of Plain Dealer reporters fanned across the city to experience the quality of life through the eyes and ears of Cleveland residents.

Cleveland, this is what your city officials had to say about their responsibility to your quality of life.

Mayor Frank Jackson

When Frank Jackson ran for mayor in 2005, he built his campaign on the "broken windows'' theory of crime prevention — that addressing quality-of-life issues deters crime. But a year and a half into his term, residents complain that the mayor hasn't done much to remedy the problems infecting the neighborhoods.

Police ignore low-priority disturbances until they escalate to violence or murder. Run-down abandoned houses — broken windows and all — still harbor vagrants, drug addicts and prostitutes, keeping fearful residents imprisoned in their homes and alienated from their neighbors.

Jackson declined to address any of the incidents that Plain Dealer reporters saw. He would not discuss why it took police 15 minutes to show up after a 9-1-1 call about a man shot in the head or how police called to break up a party did not even get out of their car.

Instead, Jackson talked in broad terms about his quiet work to improve the quality of life for Clevelanders.

He pointed to his growing One Voice, Zero Tolerance program, which gives thousands of teens summer jobs and runs tutoring programs through the city's recreation centers.

And he said that a police reorganization under way, which includes eliminating a police district, will move more officers to high-crime areas. He proposes to shift 45 officers from the airport to the streets and add 24 police cars to beef up patrols.

Jackson says the biggest problem the city faces is organized crime and drug trafficking. He said the Cleveland police, FBI, Cuyahoga County Sheriff's Office and the federal Drug Enforcement Administration have rounded up 190 drug-trafficking suspects.

The mayor rejected using online crime reporting — like a system used in Chicago — because he thinks it deters people from calling the police to report crimes.

But he sympathizes with residents, having witnessed the quality of life in Cleveland degenerate from his own home in the Central neighborhood.

"If you took some of the crime in this city and put it anywhere else outside of Cleveland, those places would be wiped out,'' Jackson said. "The residents here are strong.''

Police Chief Michael McGrath

One chilly spring night, dozens of club-goers straggled in and out of a near West Side dance club in the heart of a residential district. Music thumped nearby porches, and two men snorted lines of cocaine in the darkened cab of an idling pickup truck.

Meanwhile, within sight, a Cleveland police officer ticketed parked cars on an adjacent street and drove away, never stopping to deal with the more serious crime in his view.

Three weeks later, one patron shot another in the head outside the bar, and police took 15 minutes to respond.

Why? Police Chief Michael McGrath wouldn't discuss the incident in an interview. Like the mayor, he declined to discuss any of the specific incidents witnessed by Plain Dealer reporters.

Frustrated residents say police are almost nonexistent in the neighborhood and show up only to perform safe police duties. Criminals know that police won't bother, and crime runs rampant because of it, residents argue.

McGrath said that the perception of high crime is spurred by the media and residents who really don't have the facts. Crime is down, statistically, he said. Except for murder. The murder rate is climbing again, after a decade of decline.

McGrath said most residents understand that police are doing their best with limited resources. For every complaint the department processes, it receives five compliments, he said.

McGrath attributed the overall decrease in crime to heeding the broken-windows theory. He pointed out that police departments across the country, including Cleveland safety forces, are focusing on quality-of-life issues to lower crime overall.

But at another point McGrath argued that most quality-of-life issues are not a police problem but stem from poverty, social ills and other symptoms of urban decay. He said city officials, schools and other agencies leave the problems unmanaged until they spawn crime. Police deal with the aftermath, he said.

Safety Director Martin Flask

Safety Director Martin Flask said there is no distinction between quality-of-life issues and crime.

"Regardless if it was loud music or kids playing in the street, all those are criminal acts,'' Flask said in an interview.

Each of Cleveland's six police districts has 17 to 19 community-service officers and a vice squad that tend to handle quality-of-life issues, he said. But police response is slow to calls not involving death or serious injury, Flask admitted.

"Our response time is not what the community expects,'' he said. "I'll argue this forever, that we have a division of police that's responsive.''

Jackson recently announced a plan that could speed up police response to calls that are classified priority three and four, the low end of the scale. The mayor proposed adding 24 police cars to the streets daily by assigning officers to drive alone rather than with partners.

The city also plans eventually to put crime reports and other safety data online, Flask said.

Flask said he is encouraged that statistics show overall crime is down 15 percent this year compared with last, despite a rise in homicides.

Housing Director Ed Rybka

As the city's housing director, Ed Rybka is responsible for designing a plan to deal with the 7,000 uninhabited city houses that are rotting away, plaguing the neighborhoods.

And he had some answers for residents at a recent community meeting on the West Side.

Rybka noted that the city's demolition and board-up budget tripled this year, to $6 million. The city has demolished more than twice as many abandoned houses as last year and condemned nearly 800 structures. Hundreds more have been boarded up. As a point of comparison, he added, only 497 were condemned in all of 2006.

The housing director, who once served on the City Council and fought blight in his ward, said one of the biggest challenges that he and Jackson face is changing the culture of the Housing Department. In the past, the department has sought to prosecute easy targets — slapping violations on the elderly instead of hunting down absentee landlords or the owners of abandoned houses, he said.

Rybka also told residents that the city has issued violation notices to all 101 scrap yards in the city for violations that include accepting aluminum and copper stripped from Cleveland houses.

But when residents complained about bars and nightclubs operating without occupancy certificates or the proper city permits, Rybka acknowledged that only one inspector works the night shift to visit bars, nightclubs and restaurants.

Joe Santiago, Ward 14 councilman

While their grandchildren slept on an oversized armchair in their living room, Reno and Rowena Ventura watched in horror as a man — a patron of the dance club across the street on Storer Avenue — was beaten and shot in their front yard.

After that night, a city inspector cited the bar, El Tropical Restaurant and Lounge, for violating the city's zoning laws and operating a dance club within 500 feet of a residential district.

Club owners have a chance to appeal the citation. Meanwhile, the club is still operating — its patrons as disruptive as ever. And residents have asked their city councilman, Joe Santiago, to help them fight the bar by either objecting to its liquor license or supporting a movement to dry out the precinct and eliminate several bars in the area.

In the spring, at a neighborhood meeting called by the Stockyards Redevelopment Corp. to discuss the problems, Santiago held up El Tropical as an example of viable economic development in his ward. He recanted his support of the nightclub after a Plain Dealer reporter and photographer witnessed the shooting outside the bar in June.

So far, he has formally opposed the bar's liquor license, which will come up for review by the state liquor control board this year.

"It's a fine balance,'' Santiago said in an interview in his ward office. "I support the residents 100 percent. But every business is important, too. The more businesses we attract, the more jobs and the more stable our ward becomes.''

Santiago said he has been scrambling for economic development similar to what's happening in the nearby Tremont and Ohio City neighborhoods. He likened these more-thriving areas to the fruit of the apple and called his ward "the apple's rotting core.''

Santiago said he was unaware that several bars in his ward, including El Tropical, have been issued citations for operating outside their legal use. He said he did not know that the city's building and housing code prohibits bars from operating as nightclubs with live music, DJs or dance floors within 500 feet of a residential area, without a variance from the city's Zoning Board of Appeals.

Santiago insisted that the bars in his ward have been operating in their current capacity for decades. He said that if the law exists, it's antiquated, and he suspects that the city's charter review commission will update any laws prohibiting the bars' operation.

The housing code, however, is not a part of the city charter and will not be reviewed by the commission.

Nina Turner, Ward 1 councilwoman

When Nina Turner ran for the City Council two years ago, she said she would deal with quality-of-life crimes like vandalism, loud music and loitering by advocating for community policing and active crime-watch groups.

She was elected, but has she fulfilled the promise?

Turner said it's too early for her to be judged.

"That's hard to measure,'' she said. "Especially because the city seems to be in a valley period in terms of people feeling safe.''

Turner said the City Council, Mayor Frank Jackson and other politicians can't save Cleveland.

"If you're waiting on government to solve all your problems, then you're going to be waiting for a very long time,'' Turner said. "Families build stable citizens, not government.''

For her part, she said she will discuss solutions with other city officials and possibly introduce legislation to meet her goals.

Turner, whose ward includes the Lee-Harvard and Lee-Miles neighborhoods, has become more focused on crime of late. She said she long was aware that a small group of people in her ward made life hard for the law-abiding, lifelong residents, but the July shootings of two young children near Kerruish Park shook the neighborhoods and left Turner scrambling to reassure residents that thugs aren't overrunning the streets.

"People will remember that — a 2-year-old and a 6-year-old, they were shot,'' Turner said in a recent interview. "That changes the reality that Ward 1 is relatively safe.''

The children survived the shooting. Turner said she's working to make sure her ward survives.

She went door-to-door on East 173rd Street, where the shooting happened, to visit with residents. And she's recruiting responsible younger men in the community for a male role model program to keep teens in check.

But it's possible some problems can't be fixed.

"Do we have a generation that is just lost,'' Turner wondered, "and we got to write them off to start with today's kindergartners, or today's preschoolers, or those who are still in the womb?

"A part of me wants to say yes.''

Joe Cimperman, Ward 13 councilman

Joe Cimperman has pretty much given up on police solving the crime problem. One of the reasons residents in his ward are so active in doing their own sweeps for drug dealers, vagrants and prostitutes is that Cimperman is so active with residents. He helps them organize.

In the Ohio City neighborhood, residents band together, walking their dogs through parks, riding bikes in large groups and protesting on street corners with signs to deter hookers and johns. They also work hard at fostering relationships with the police, who support their efforts and shore up patrols to protect them as they reclaim their streets.

Cimperman, whose Ward 13 also includes the western portion of the St. Clair-Superior neighborhood, believes in being honest about the assets and deficits of the neighborhood.

Cimperman believes that targeting specific problem houses or problem people is an effective way to maintain neighborhoods. He often attends criminal sentencing hearings with groups of residents to show that the neighborhood cares and to ask the judge for the maximum sentence.

"It's beyond any one person or any one generation to ruin or save a community,'' he said.

Zack Reed, Ward 3 councilman

Zack Reed represents Mount Pleasant, a community crippled by drugs and violence. Reed sometimes patrols the streets himself, shooing drug dealers away from street corners and dice-shooting gamblers away from vacant houses.

The "modern-day terrorists,'' as he calls the neighborhood criminals and punks, retaliated and threw bricks at his BMW about a year ago. He said his life has been threatened five times this summer.

"There is no more important issue facing the city of Cleveland right now than crime,'' he said.

Reed said drug dealing and other crimes have persisted throughout his City Council tenure, through three mayors. He criticized Safety Director Martin Flask, and his comments about Mayor Frank Jackson suggest he believes the mayor could take a stronger public stance on safety.

Reed said police need a zero-tolerance approach with neighborhood criminals.

"We've got to change the way we are policing in this city,'' he said. "The present way is not working.''

Flask said he is aware of Reed's preference for a more-aggressive police force. But there are limits.

"We can't have police officers stepping on individual rights. The right to stand on a corner is the right to stand on a corner,'' Flask said.

Reed said he has spent more than $80,000 in federal block grant money since 2006 to hire off-duty police to work extra hours in the community. He also has seen to the installation of more than 100 security cameras throughout Mount Pleasant.

"I don't think I've done everything,'' he said. "We as a council need to do a better job of checking the administration when it comes to crime.''

Jay Westbrook, Ward 18 councilman

Every weekend for the last several years, Jasper Avenue resident Bob Kiss lost sleep, watching as drunken debauchery unfolded at a house just cattycorner from his own.

Some nights, hundreds of young party-goers blasted music, drove the streets drunk, vomited in the yard and performed lewd acts in plain view.

Police rarely paid attention to the house. One night, police took hours to respond to complaints, and even when a cruiser drove past the party, the cop simply yelled from the driver's seat for the group to keep it down. He never got out of the car.

But the police report tells a different story — indicating that police got out of the car and spoke to the tenants personally.

Fortunately for Kiss, the house has been quiet for the last couple of months, since a representative from City Councilman Jay Westbrook's office finally talked to the landlord and tenants. But Westbrook wonders why the problems happen on Jasper in Cleveland, when the city of Brooklyn, just a close municipal border away, doesn't deal with the same complaints about quality-of-life issues.

The councilman blames poor communication between Cleveland police and residents. Cleveland has a whole book of city code governing noise, pit bulls and drag racing, he said, but not all those rules are being enforced.

"In general, I'm not happy with the police response,'' he said.

Westbrook would like to see officers follow up on complaints and spend more time targeting problem areas.

"If quality of life were a hostage, all these resources would be mobilized to save this hostage,'' Westbrook said. "Reality is that we have the resources. We're just not deploying them well.''

He said that in fractured urban neighborhoods police need to embrace the Bob Kisses, who are trying to help them, not downplay their complaints. He said police must endorse a grass-roots response to crime. The citizens that do stand up to lead, he said, need affirmation from the city's leadership as much as the criminals need to be shamed.

"We can build all the wind turbines and all the Medical Marts, but if we don't have safety, we are flushing the city all down the drain.''

(This story was reported and written by Plain Dealer reporters Leila Atassi, Rachel Dissell, Stan Donaldson, Joe Guillen, Jesse Tinsley, Gabe Baird and Michael Heaton.)