Pubdate: Sat, 17 Jun 2006 Source: Palm Beach Post, The (FL) Copyright: 2006 The Palm Beach Post Contact: http://www.palmbeachpost.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/333 Author: George McEvoy, Palm Beach Post Columnist DON'T BELIEVE EXCUSES FOR HEARTLAND CRIME RISE If you feel the urge to take a midnight stroll alone, you might be safer sauntering through New York City's Hell's Kitchen neighborhood than some folksy street in a smaller, Midwest town. That, at least, would seem to be the conclusion of the preliminary 2005 FBI report released Monday. They call it a "preliminary report" because final statistics won't be made public until October. Still, Monday's report showed that violent crime had increased in the United States for the first time in four years, up 2.5 percent in 2005 over the previous year. In murders alone, the total went up 4.8 percent nationwide. St. Louis, Houston, Milwaukee and Philadelphia all showed an increase in murders, while New York, Los Angeles and Miami had decreases. The biggest jumps in murders, however, came in medium-size cities in the Midwest. Law-enforcement officials and other experts on crime gave several possible reasons for the increase in what has been called the "heartland of America." Alfred Blumstein, a criminologist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, said some of the increase could be traced to police efforts being diverted from domestic crime to the war on terrorism. He and others also cited budget cuts by the federal government that have reduced police manpower, plus cuts in social services. Still others said the economy could be to blame, at least in part, because there are fewer jobs available for young people. I can't argue with any of that, but I do find fault with several alleged "experts" who said that the rise in violent crime in 2005 happened because the street gangs of the big cities last year had spread their activities into the smaller cities and towns of the interior, where the police are ill-equipped to deal with them. I had to chuckle at that one, because I heard the same excuse about 25 years ago. On a visit with relatives in Oklahoma City, I dropped in at the state police investigative office to chat with a couple of acquaintances. And this is what they told me - 25 years ago: Many members of the vicious Crips and Bloods street gangs of the Los Angeles area were originally from Oklahoma and other Southwestern and Midwestern states, and they would come home occasionally for family gatherings. Meanwhile, the big cities of California, with their large and ultra- modern police forces, were making it very difficult for the gangs to engage in their main occupation, dealing drugs. So, a number of the gang members decided to branch out into the nearby states they had been visiting. Gang symbols began to appear on walls, and drive-by shootings became more common. The transplanted gangsters dealt mostly in crack cocaine and pot back then. Today, methamphetamines seem to be the big seller. Meanwhile, some local boys made a big switch. These were the moonshiners of southeastern Oklahoma. They lived and operated in the infamous Cookson Hills, the heavily wooded, jungle-like home to outlaws since the days when it was part of the Cherokee Strip. The Dalton Boys had hidden out in those hills, as did the Younger Brothers, cousins of Frank and Jesse James. Oklahoma's most infamous bad man - Charles Arthur "Pretty Boy" Floyd - was known as "the Robin Hood of the Cookson Hills" during the Dust Bowl days of the 1930s. Anyway, more than 25 years ago, the Cookson moonshiners pretty much stopped making white lightning and switched to growing marijuana. It was easier to maintain, cheaper to handle and much more profitable. I asked whether the Crips and Bloods, or any big-time racketeers from the East, had moved in on the Cookson pot gardens. No, the state cops told me, but if they did, nobody ever heard from them again. So the Los Angeles gangs kept to the small towns, and the pot growers stayed in the woods, in kind of an uneasy truce. And, as I said, that was more than 25 years ago. - --- MAP posted-by: Steve Heath