To the Editor:
I read with interest Jeff Siegel’s editorial entitled “Urban Decline” in the January 2004 Lakewood/East Dallas Advocate. I have to disagree with him regarding his reasons why crime is getting “hyped” now and creating a distorted view of Dallas.
1. The Pampers Theory. I would venture to say that more people who have moved to Dallas in the past several years are not reporters and producers than are, and plenty of people moving here are not experiencing urban crime for the first time. In my case, I have lived just blocks from the storied Cabrini-Green project in Chicago, and spent several years on Chicago’s South Side. I know urban crime. Dallas crime beats that, hands down. I’ve also lived in the safest city in America. Safe is better.
2. City Hall fun and games. Certainly our police force is in shambles, and it shows. Have you checked the clearance rate for Dallas crimes? Very few in the PD are doing anything about solving crime. They just bag ’em and tag ’em.
3. Crime is not a function of population density. Using that logic, explain Tokyo. It is a function of bad guys beating up on the good guys. How about taking steps to reduce the number of bad guys? What about Dallas makes it easy for the bad guys to be here? Cheap rent? Low clearance rate? Transient population?
4. There is no need to hire more cops — only one-third of Dallas cops are on the street, fighting crime. That’s about 1,000 cops out there, each responsible for protecting 1,000 people. The rest — the other 2,000 — are in desk jobs. How about they get out from behind (or underneath) their desks and actually hit the beat? We could triple our police force without adding a single person.
I moved to Dallas two years ago with high hopes of friendly Texans, blue skies and great BBQ. The crime scares me to death, and I can’t wait to get out of here. And I’m in a safe neighborhood “for Dallas.” It’s kind of like being in the coldest part of hell. — Beth Link
