Even the lucky are sometimes afraid

— We harnessed the sisters, put Sherpa in her Radio Flyer wagon and went out for our evening walk. We made it a couple of hundred yards before one of our neighbors called to us, to ask if we were aware of the news about the latest “spate” -they’ve succumbed to the journalese-of daytime burglaries.

We had heard some things, and they had heard some things, and we stood there in the road trading rumors for a moment. A couple had left their house for half an hour on Sunday morning, leaving their big dog in his crate and their alarm system off and returned to depressing violation. Another neighbor heard someone’s alarm going off, went to investigate and saw a man fleeing on a bicycle. He rode right past the police as they pulled up.

We shook our heads and promised to be vigilant and turned the corner, where a recent victim sat in his truck talking to another neighbor. He waved me over to his truck to tell me about the “shootout” that had occurred the night before, about a block from where I stood.

His version was essentially the same as one somewhat gingerly reported on the Facebook page of the indispensable hyperlocal website Forbidden Hillcrest (forbiddenhillcrest.com):

A neighbor tells me that the shooting last night at 601 Ridgeway (Kavanaugh) was during a residential burglary. According to the story, the resident shot multiple rounds at the men who he found burglarizing his home, hitting his targets twice.

The resident was a reputed drug dealer and told the police a story contrary to the facts at hand and was arrested. The bullet-ridden burglars told yet another story at the hospital, a story which didn’t place them at the scene at all.

The recent victim told me he was going to drive by the scene, just to see what he could see, and the neighbor he was talking to allowed that it was “getting like the Old West” in our neighborhood and mentioned an imminent meeting with the police that we might want to attend. We commiserated, and observed that every couple of years we seem to have a spike in crimes against property-a couple of years ago, there were anecdotal reports of homeless people kicking in doors, grabbing whatever cash and food they could, and dashing out.

At the time we thought that could partially be attributed to a police crackdown on downtown panhandling, and the uprooting of a couple of homeless encampments along Cantrell Road. We attributed it to simple hydraulics-what’s suppressed in one location, erupts in another.

So while it’s fine to make grand statements about cutting off the pressure by bring down the general levels of misery, it’s infinitely easier and more effective to make the authorities uncomfortable. Call a meeting, make enough noise and watch the swift re-ordering of civic priorities.

More patrol units in our neighborhood necessarily means less in others, but we have certain expectations. We expect to be able to walk our streets after dark. We expect our stuff to still be there when we come home. It doesn’t seem like much to ask, but most of the world isn’t so privileged. Compared to most of the world, my neighbors and I enjoy an undreamed of level of security. We shouldn’t be afraid.

Intellectually we know this, for most of us are people who regularly consider the inequities of the world and feel-if not quite guilty-at least a little bad about it. Most of us do what we think we can to help, to here and there mitigate the meanness of the world. My neighbors are the kind of people who go to fundraisers, who tithe and volunteer, who tell their children to remember that not everyone has had their advantages.

They are good people, nearly all of them.

But bad things happen to them sometimes, just as bad things sometimes happen to good people everywhere. Bad things happen more frequently in poorer neighborhoods with high population densities, but they happen in relatively safe neighborhoods as well. And they will continue to happen so long as some of us are so discontented or desperate that they imagine the breaking of doors and the shattering of shop windows.

Yet every crime is also a personal insult-even if I understand that criminals are generally stressed out opportunists snatching at low hanging fruit, I want the thief who took my stuff not merely corrected but humiliated. Having some understanding of the social and economic factors that contribute to crime does nothing to curb the immediate emotional response. One reason fora hothead like myself not to own a gun is that I just might shoot you for trying to take my golf clubs.

Crime will be with us always, no matter what punishments and remediations we devise. To a point we can legislate the level-every prohibition manufactures criminals, every rule creates cheaters-but to eradicate the roots of crime would take an overhaul of the human heart. We are yet more beast than angel, smarter apes with instincts for cruelty and rationalization. So the rich design the law to make their avaricial looting not only legal but an American virtue.

We all have our own stories. I have seen violent crime up close as few people other than police officers and victims and perps have seen it. I have seen sad crazy things, and when I had nothing I felt all right living in what I now consider dangerous places.

Now I don’t imagine I have as much a stake in things as those of my neighbors with children and hopes for the future. I think I see it all as provisional. While I have more than I ever expected to have, I have seen it all taken away from others and don’t imagine that I am so special that it could not happen to me.

So I do the things they say to do. I talk to my neighbors and we look out for each other. (Though each of us tries to make our house slightly less attractive to thieves than the one next door.) I welcome the police cars that occasionally crawl up our street. I try to vary my schedule, to avoid advertising when I am away and keep the insurance premiums paid.

I’ve just been lucky, so far, that’s all-lucky and careful with locks.

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

Read more at

blooddirtandangels.com

Perspective, Pages 86 on 10/30/2011

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