Timely thread. Thanks for the discussion Tom!
Case in point. I live in a small town in W. Texas.
About 3 months ago a guy went nuts and shot up a local restaurant and then drove down the road and shot up a house. The town has a statistic of violent crime odds being 1:2500.
Drive 20 minutes west to Hobbs, and the statistic jumps to 1:130 and Hobbs is a town of 40,000.
We have low population (<50K) towns around here that seems to be crime hotspots. It all depends on the locals and what crappy cities they're closest to.
Semper Gumby, Always Flexible
Glad I rode through Hobbs on my motorcycle in the rain...Originally Posted by fixer
There's nothing civil about this war.
I spent the first thirteen years of my career working in a rural area. I was a city boy and was quite surprised at the things that go on in small communities. The small american town, ala Norman Rockwell, has always been a fantasy. There is no truly safe place.
We may lose and we may win, but we will never be here again.......
When I started my department had two districts. The west side was nicknamed "Hollywood" and the east side was nicknamed "Mayberry. There was just as much crime out east. You just had to drive further to get to it. "Mayberry" had some pretty hardcore gang neighborhoods. My first beat was bigger than all of "Hollywood" combined.
I worked one month in Hollywood on FTO. I asked a guy who graduated from the Academy about three months ahead of me a question. He said I dont talk to rookies if that gives you idea about the reputation of that district. I didn't work there again for 12 years.
Just a dog chauffeur that used to hold the dumb end of the leash.
You MAY be crazy!
“Remember, being healthy is basically just dying as slowly as possible,” Ricky Gervais
It was never really in doubt...
There's nothing civil about this war.
I may be both. However I remember when a small town in my home county was built around agriculture and a vegetable canning factory. Then the factory shut down. Then the town was built around meth and whores. Now the town is built around prescription drugs, heroin, and whores. In a town of 3500 or so, they had over 100 new HIV cases discovered a few years back due to needle sharing and whoring. Over 200 cases would eventually be confirmed.
My grandfather's home town in WV used to be full of coal miners. It's now full of welfare recipients and pill heads.
These places were certainly not at the top of the economic scale at any point. They weren't "idyllic", but it damn sure was "the good old days" compared to what those towns look like today. Cities have always been shitholes to a greater or lesser degree, but it took job loss and modern drugs to really fuck up the small towns.
I live in a town about 20 miles NE of Atlanta which has been voted one of the 10 best places to live in the U.S. more than once. It is a nice community. We've had a few home invasions in our neighborhood, one of which ended in gunfire (house right behind ours). It seems violent crimes happen nearby on a semi-regular basis. Recently a woman was charged with stabbing her husband and four of her kids to death in a town not far from us. Most of the violent crimes around us are probably domestic in nature but we do hear about home invasions, burglaries, and other attacks.
I grew up in a small town (pop. 2500) in Ohio. We had a horrific crime there when I was a kid -- the wife of a gun shop owner was kidnapped and later murdered by some people from a neighboring town. We frequented that store a lot at the time -- mostly for hunting and fishing supplies.
This stuff can happen anywhere.
That, I also think HipHop, the constant poisonous garbage amoral cultural rot messages from Hollywood and television contributed too.
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