NEW YORK – On an unusually cool night for summer, Mike Perry and his crew thread the sidewalks running through Staten Island’s Stapleton Houses, tracked by police cameras bolted to the apartment blocks and positioned atop poles.

“The better the weather, the more people will be out,” Perry says. “Activity – not all good, neither.”

Perry’s group, five black men and one Latino, all acknowledge past crimes or prison time. Perry, himself, used to deal drugs around another low-income housing complex two miles away. Now, their Cure Violence team works to defuse arguments that can lead to shootings and match people with job training and counseling. Their goals are not so different from those of police.

While Perry gives cops their due, he keeps his distance. Two years ago, on July 17, 2014, within walking distance of this spot, a black man named Eric Garner died in a confrontation with police. Garner was suspected of selling loose cigarettes; an officer wrestled him to the ground by his neck. His last words – “I can’t breathe” – were captured on cellphone video that spread across the internet.

“I know those officers did not mean to kill Eric,” says Perry, a 37-year-old father of two who knew Garner.

But, “you need to look an officer in the eye who doesn’t understand and go, ‘Brother, I want to get home, too.’ They’re defending these communities that they don’t know.”

As Americans struggle with the highly publicized deaths of black men in encounters with police in Minnesota, Louisiana and across the country, and now the sniper killing of five Dallas officers, Perry and his fellow Staten Islanders have the dubious distinction of being a step ahead. Since Garner’s death in July 2014, they have confronted a measure of the anger, pain and alienation that the nation now shares. On this 58-square-mile island that residents say often feels like a small town though it’s part of the nation’s biggest city, police and the policed have had to coexist.

The events of recent weeks have focused new attention on the chasm between police and minorities, one of so many divides in this contentious election year. Years of tension have left people wary in both the policing community and in minority neighborhoods, with many yearning for one another’s respect.

It’s not simple, though, to change the way people see each other.

“What we have to bear in mind is that when a particular culture has been created, or when people sense a certain culture is operating, it takes time in order to change that culture,” says the Rev. Victor Brown, a pastor of one of the larger African-American churches on Staten Island’s North Shore. Brown, a spiritual adviser to Garner’s family who criticized the grand jury’s decision not to indict the officer involved, serves as a part-time police chaplain.

The challenge was captured in a nationwide poll last summer by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs, in which 81 percent of black Americans said police are too quick to use deadly force, compared with 33 percent of whites. A third of blacks said they trust police to work in the best interest of the community, less than half the percentage of whites.

The voices of Staten Islanders speak to attitudes and experience that are often more complicated than might be reflected in polling numbers.

Like the white retired officer who credits a longtime black partner for much of his success in patrolling poor neighborhoods, and worries today’s cops are not street-wise enough.

Or the black street vendor who rails against police for Garner’s death, but says officers are needed to clean up the street where that death occurred.

“I think the divide is worse than it should be and more than people think it is,” says Joe Brandefine, a retired NYPD detective who helped organize a 2014 pro-police rally. “I believe there’s truth in both sides, that each side needs to see each other in a little different light.”

On Staten Island, police-community relationships have long been personal.

About 3,000 police officers, scores of retired cops and their families live here, many in the heavily white neighborhoods on the southern two-thirds of the island. In those neighborhoods, protests that followed Garner’s death in July 2014 were met with “God Bless the NYPD” yard signs and pro-police rallies. The tensions intensified after a grand jury decided in late 2014 not to indict the officer for Garner’s death. Two weeks later, a man claiming vengeance killed two police officers in Brooklyn, one of them a former Staten Island school safety officer.

“As far as Staten Islanders are concerned, the police are family and I think it’s like standing by your family no matter what,” says Samantha Smith, whose father, grandfather and uncle all worked as officers and who is writing a book about 9/11’s impact on the island’s first responder households.

On an island of 475,000 that is 75 percent white and mostly suburban, the North Shore’s comparatively dense neighborhoods are home to nearly all of the borough’s African-Americans, enclaves of Liberian, Mexican and Sri Lankan immigrants.

Five miles of water divide Staten Island from Manhattan’s southern tip and you can’t get here by subway. That separation from the rest of the city has long united islanders – not just the ferry ride or detested bridge tolls, but also conservative politics and a shared sense that their borough is ignored.

Two years after police wrestled Eric Garner to the sidewalk in front of Bay Beauty Supply, his mother, Gwen Carr, stands in the small park across the street and cringes at the scene.

A man who appears to be homeless sprawls across a bench, asleep though it’s not yet 1 p.m.

A young woman – “Alcohol Gives You Wings,” tattooed down her left arm – sits on the edge of a dry fountain, trying to sell used shoes.

“How much good did they do?” Carr says of police, who arrested her son repeatedly for selling untaxed cigarettes. “Where are they when you need them?”

New York paid $5.9 million to settle claims by Garner’s family, including his five children. That does not satisfy Carr. If her son’s death means something, officials can clean up this block where regulars, black and white, say drinking and drugs have increased since Garner’s death.

Confrontational cops are not the answer, Carr says.

Instead, she wants New York to turn the park into a playground, named for her son. City law reserves playgrounds for children, their parents and guardians. Transforming this triangle would displace the addicts, who could be directed to treatment, and make this area safe, Carr says.

Police should play a role, she says. But too many haven’t built relationships with people in the neighborhoods they patrol, Carr says.

“If they did there would be less killing, less crime. The police wouldn’t have that much of a problem weeding out the bad guys because the people in the community would let them know,” she says. “That is not snitching. That is trying to preserve your community.”

That requires trust, though.

“The more I think about it (Garner’s death) the madder I get, because that man should not be dead,” says Doug Brinson, who sells T-shirts and household items from folding tables on the sidewalk.

Most police are good, but they don’t do enough to get rid of the bad ones, says Brinson, who is in his 60s and says he has been arrested for unlawful peddling. Still, he says, the fights, the drinking and the drug use here make clear this neighborhood needs police.

“You’ve got to have cops on this block,” Brinson says, looking down at the makeshift memorial for Garner that he helped build.

“You’ve got to coexist with the guys on the beat. You’ve got to. It’s only fair.”