For months, if not years, residents have complained about loiterers, suspicious sales and shots fired at and around the Midway BP gas station at Hamline and University avenues, the scene of a fatal shooting last June.

On Saturday and Sunday nights, with her own son’s well-being in mind, a St. Paul comedienne took matters into her own hands, only to receive an unexpected assist from law enforcement.

Performer Shay Webbie, who bills herself on social media as “Black+Talented=DangerouslyFunny,” broadcast her one-woman crime protest live from the Midway BP gas pumps on both Saturday and Sunday nights via Facebook.

Before long, nearly two dozen supporters had joined her. They included community organizer Johnny Howard, school board candidate Chauntyl Allen, Pastor Darryl Spence of the God Squad, a Snelling Avenue clothing store owner, St. Paul police officers and other neighborhood folks.

“I never knew it would reach …. so many people,” said Webbie on Facebook, talking to a supporter. “It’s something I do when I’m frustrated. I go live.”

Sunday evening, Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher came to hang out by the pumps, as well.

“It takes a community to change what’s going on. … If you’re not out here physically, you’re not making change,” Webbie said in one of her updates on Facebook, adding later, “The support is amazing.”

She then introduced herself to someone off camera, explaining, “When you come here, typically, there’s eight or nine kids hanging out, plus the crack heads … And nobody’s doing nothing about it. My kid hangs out here. His friends hang out here. Other kids and people are selling them weed. They’re buying drugs. These kids belong at home, in bed, especially because it’s after curfew. And they don’t say ‘leave.’ They let them in the store.”

Webbie at one point responds to critical comments from a handful of young men who are leaning against a car smoking and yells, “I’m being weird? Because I’m protecting my neighborhood from goons like you?”

In an interview with the Pioneer Press last month, gas station owner Khaled Aloul of Bloomington said he’s not responsible for crime in the neighborhood, and blamed police for not doing more to keep his customers safe.

At the urging of the St. Paul City Attorney’s office, the Department of Safety and Inspections and St. Paul Police, the St. Paul City Council is reviewing the possibility of terminating the Midway BP gas station’s licenses to sell gas and tobacco. St. Paul Police have stepped up their surveillance of the station, but not without incident.

Police recently encountered a 13-year-old girl who had been warned not to return to the store and then found her into a nearby UPS Store, where her difficult arrest was videotaped by a clerk, who later resigned.

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“How can I save my son from being the next balloon statue and parade of flowers that are left out? … Let’s say my son is shot and killed by a cop, then Black Lives Matter steps in,” Webbie said into the camera. “Help him before my son is dead … There are a lot of kids that are out here struggling.”

Fletcher, in an interview on Monday, said Ramsey County opened a curfew center on St. Peter Street in St. Paul during his first term as sheriff in the late 1990s.

The center, which housed teens who had been picked up by police for being out after city curfew until their parents could come get them, closed after he left office in 2011. During the national economic downtown of 2008-2009, many other departments also closed curfew centers.

“It would be great if we could reopen it at some point,” Fletcher said. “The goal of the curfew center was always to get kids the help they need. The curfew center was staffed with outreach workers and members of the St. Paul Youth Services Bureau, that could help determine what was going on with the families. It was never a punitive concept.”

Fletcher, however, said simply reopening a building and hoping for the best isn’t enough.

“First, there has to be some agreement, and this is what I found last night: a broad group of diverse people has to agree that it’s not good for kids 12 to 13 to be hanging out at the corner of Hamline and University late at night,” he said. “The question is, what do we do with those kids? Many of these kids are essentially homeless, sleeping on couches of other people. We have to have programs in place so it doesn’t become a revolving door.”

Video includes profanity.