Following neighborhood complaints, city officials removed loiterers from “Vagrant Park, “shown above, last week. The park, reported residents, was being used by drifters and drug users as a camping ground.

Last Tuesday, a man ran out of Cambridge Music with a stolen guitar in hand and two store employees in hot pursuit.

The chase took a circuitous route around Porter Square, ending when the thief threw the guitar over a high wall and proceeded to hurl himself over as well.

When his pursuers heard a loud crunch on the other side of the wall—the man apparently landed on the guitar—they gave up chase.

Meanwhile, back at the shop, owner Dennis Keller struck up a conversation with an acquaintance who had just stepped in.

Oblivious to the events taking place as he spoke, Thomas Lenthall, whose wife owns a nearby Scottish imports shop, asked Keller if he would be coming to the Porter Square Neighbors Association meeting later that week. The topic was to be increased neighborhood crime.

“It was as if it was scripted,” said Keller, who did come to the meeting two days later in the basement of the Metropolitan Baptist Church.

Nearly 40 people attended, most of them local store owners concerned that more and more people who seem to be under the influence of drugs and alcohol are hanging out in the Square.

“It’s not as bad as Central Square or Harvard Square,” says association President Dave Reed, “but we don’t want it to become like there here.”

“The message will certainly get out to them that we’re organized,” he says. “People make a nuisance of themselves when they’re allowed to.... One or two aren’t a problem, but right now everyone has had some pretty ugly experiences.”

Shop owners complain that rowdy behavior—calling out obscenities and harrying passers-by—is scaring customers away. At the meeting, many illustrated their complaints with stories of petty crime and threatening encounters in the past few months.

Though all say they have observed a relatively recent and pronounced rise in trouble in the streets of Porter Square, they do not agree on when drifters and drug users started becoming such a problem.

Many claim that the problem has increased since the end of summer, when budget cuts forced the city to drastically reduce the hours of local drug rehabilitation centers and close down several homeless centers.

But others say that the problem dates back at least a year, the result of something they call the “balloon effect.”

“They rotate, like a balloon that, when you squeeze it, it pops out on the other side,” Keller says.

Their theory is that the loiterers and hangers-about who have been disruptive lately came from elsewhere in Cambridge. Perhaps they were ousted—as the Porter Square Neighbors Association hopes to do—by a similar coalition of unhappy shopowners, say Keller and others.