Posted on 07/06/2004 2:58:02 PM PDT by neverdem
GREENVILLE, N.C. - Leroy Hyman, a retired postal worker, lives in a tidy working-class neighborhood of Greenville. Petunias and forget-me-nots frame the front porches of brick ranch homes. On the surface, it is all Norman Rockwell - geraniums and Southern geniality.
Yet underneath lies something more sinister. Last week, a young man was shot to death a few blocks away. A month before, a similar scene had unfolded on a nearby block. Pops of small-caliber gunfire frequently punctuate the night.
"The violent crime in Greenville is terrible, worse even than New York City," says Mr. Hyman, a native North Carolinian who lived for years in the Bronx before retiring back here. "There's a lot of killing in this place."
Violent crime, once mainly the purview of big urban centers, is now growing in many small and mid-size cities. Even as aggressive policing in places like Boston, New York, and Los Angeles helped dramatically lower the nation's overall crime rate in the 1990s, towns like Springfield, Mass.; Victoria, Texas; and Hattiesburg, Miss.; are now seeing a rise in murder, assaults, and other violent incidents.
Some analysts, in fact, attribute the increase to criminal elements being shooed out of the larger cities. Others say it's simply the lack of good jobs, and a culture of violence that has seeped into small-town America.
"I think now we're seeing some of the medium-sized and small cities in the US play catch-up," says Jack Levin, the director of the Brudnick Center on Violence at Northeastern University in Boston. "They never bothered to institute the reforms, policies, and programs that impacted violent crime, because ... they felt immune from what they saw as big-city issues. Now they're paying the price."
According to preliminary FBI statistics, cities with 10,000 people or fewer saw a 15 percent increase in violent crimes from 2002 to 2003, while cities with 100,000 or less experienced a 10 percent increase. This comes at a time when the average national figures have been steadily dropping. What's more, a study of crime rates in West Oakland, Calif., showed that, between 1999 and 2003, the use of a gun during aggravated assaults jumped from 19 percent to 41 percent - a trend that police see playing out across the country.
"The murder rate in small-city America right now is astronomical," says Jim Wyatt, a city councilor in Victoria, Tex. "It's a small portion of the population involved in these activities, but they have a huge effect on how the community feels about itself."
To be sure, many cities aren't standing idly by while lawlessness spreads. Some have already lowered the number of lesser crimes like larceny and robbery.
Take Greenville (pop. 60,000). A university town, Greenville is flat and lush and steamy, its modest brick-storefront downtown studded with a few banks, state offices, clubs, and grill joints. In the neighborhoods, children chase puppies as young men work on cars and women relax on porches.
In many cases, police are doing what they can, patrolling "bad neighborhoods" and expanding contact with young people. But while overall crime is down, it's the most violent acts, often the result of turf rivalries, that police are finding more difficult to curb. The city ranked 32nd nationally in terms of murders per 100,000 people last year and 52nd in terms of all violent crime - ahead of big cities like Atlanta. The violence has even spread onto the university campus, where two rapes occurred earlier this year.
"I can't say that we're seeing an increase in incidents, but we do get a steady stream of gunshot and knife wounds from fights," says Pam Cope, a nursing supervisor at East Carolina Medical Center in Greenville. "It's just a fact of life."
According to a recent RAND Corp. study, much of today's street violence stems from rivalries between "loose associations" of blacks ensnared in what researcher Jack Riley calls the "Lord of the Flies" effect. It involves the "nastiest" young men rising to the top of the drug trade, and then trying to control the streets.
All crime is local, of course, and each city has its underlying causes. As much as anything, many experts say, it's a lack of familial and community values that are contributing to the violence.
As police have taken a more get-tough approach here, it has caused a backlash: In February, 500 marched to protest the deaths of two black men in the custody of the Greenville Police Department. Experts say that, as in big cities like New York, zero-tolerance policing can help reduce crime but lead to other problems. "There's a broad feeling that [the police and the community] are not always on the same team," says Mr. Hyman.
In Victoria, Texas, a small Gulf Coast city, police in the early 1990s approached the crack trade in a big-city way: aggressively busting up drug rings and harassing troublesome parolees. But the effect has been akin to taking a bat to a wasp's nest. The city today is among the top 10 in the country in murder rankings per capita. "What happened was that we busted up a ring in a neighborhood and suddenly the activity spread all around the city," says Mr. Wyatt.
Even worse for many small cities, they often don't have the squad cars and beat cops to deal with rising crime. "Police agencies across the country are facing significant budget and manpower shortfalls," says Jeremy Wilson, a behavioral scientist at the RAND Corp. "This fact makes it even more important that they be strategic about how they expend and apply their limited resources."
Still, more and more community leaders - and the police themselves - realize that crime isn't just a law-enforcement issue. Here in Greenville, for instance, police will hold a seminar in September featuring Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, a crime expert who has founded an institute around the theory of "killology." It tries to plumb community psychology and other factors behind the violence. In Victoria, Texas, Wyatt is trying working with local churches and community groups to help reduce the violence, something Savannah, Ga., did last year after the killing of a local rap star.
The US Department of Justice, too, is getting involved. Last week, it announced that it's sending 15 federal "impact teams" to help local police departments curb violent crime in cities like Greensboro, N.C.
"The irony is that small cities are now taking their cue from major metro areas in the US that have always been associated with terrible crime," says Levin. "Now those big cities are showing the way."
Can't believe it-my old hometown
Which is a good reason for putting teen-aged gang members in prison for long sentences.
I'm curious to know if any CCW/right-to-carry legislation has passed/is pending in this area.
Gangs and drugs. It's ridiculous to think that these violent crimes are the result of "a lack of good jobs and the culture of violence", as some would have us believe.
By whom? Rival gangs perhaps?
+++++++++++++++
Why not put them in a long term gulag and let then fend for them selves.
Preferably, that gulag is located in Antarctica.
Great idea, but like pulling your hand out of a bucket of water, the hole is quickly filled with more of the same!
IIRC, Texas, North Carolina and Mississippi have CCW/CHL laws. Nebraska, Illinois, Kansas and Wisconsin join the liberal bastions on each coast forbidding concealed carry. Wisconsin failed to overturn a veto by one vote this year. Kansas' governor also vetoed a law this year. The attempt to overturn it wasn't that close, but they could have with a handful of votes.
It's alive and well in Victoria and all of TX.
We are getting more an more urban looking...'ethnic' young males between the ages of 18 and 30 hanging around our small farm town..
No jobs and school isnt in session...
Many of the tougher looking ones are Mexicans...had one in the local grocery the other day wearing his Che Gueverra tee shirt with much pride...he and his 'bros' weren't speaking any english either..at least not in public..
About 10 years ago many blue collar folks in certain areas of the LA basin found their neighborhoods riddled with gangs and their property values inflated. In an effort to "save their children" from the influence of the gangs they sold their homes and moved to rural California.
Too late. Their children, already gang bangers, simply brought the gangs to these small, peaceful, rural cities. These big city bangers were the ultimate predator released into an environment where no natural controls existed. Like voracious wolves they quickly overran the locals and the rural law enforcement presence.
Homicides, armed robbery and drug distribution shot up in these small communities over night. Local, small city police had never faced juveniles who would step out of their cars and simply fire at police officers at point blank range without running or flinching. Sections of these small towns became just to dangerous to frequent after dark by single officers in a squad car. The local police combined forces with the county sheriff and the California Highway Patrol in an effort to stem the rapidly rising tide.
Today law enforcement has stemmed the rise in crime with this joint task force effort but they can't bring crime rates down because of the protection these gang bangers and their families enjoy through the liberal interpretation of the 14th Amendment and the sanctuary of Mexico, which is always available when they are cornered. A few months in Mexico, until the heat is off, and back they come to rejoin the gang hierarchy.
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