The crime scene tape has been taken down, and the investigators have moved on, but the fear remains in the Manhattan neighborhood where a city police officer was shot dead on Tuesday. NY1's Vivian Lee filed the following report.

Residents of the East River housing development on First Avenue and 102nd Street say the shooting death of Officer Randolph Holder confirms their worst fears about their East Harlem neighborhood.

"I work, I go to school. I go straight home," said one resident.

"I would say within the last year it's gotten worse," said another resident.

"Ludicrous, to the point we have a curfew here. If it's past 9:30, everybody else is home, not trying to go outside," said a third resident.

Holder was a member of the NYPD's Public Service Area 5, which covers more than a dozen housing developments.

He was killed after responding to a call Tuesday night reporting gunshots at the East River houses. 

Across the surrounding 23rd precinct, shootings have increased 42 percent this year, and felony assaults are up 15 percent while crime in the rest of the city has ticked down.

Clark Pena, a local activist, says he remembers growing up in an East Harlem housing development decades ago when a housing officer was a familiar face.

"He used to do his own home visits," recalled Pena. "We knew him by name. I think it's a concept we may or should revisit."

Many agree and say the city should bring those those days back.

"Back in the years they had housing police actually in the projects. It was much better then," said one resident.

The career criminal arrested in Holder's murder, Tyrone Howard, was accused in a 2009 shooting at the complex that wounded two bystanders - a young boy and an older man. But the case against him was dismissed for a lack of evidence.

Howard was also a suspect in a Sept. 1 shooting at the complex and police had been trying to find him before his deadly encounter with Officer Holder.

Howard was at large because a judge decided to put him in a drug treatment program rather than in prison for dealing drugs in the East River houses.  

Howard had stopped attending the program over the summer.