One, surrounded by weeds and brush, about 3 blocks from us, is a real doozie. It started out with nightly arrests for drunkenness, theft, and vandalism. Sometimes 4 incidents every 24 hours. Now it has graduated to ‘domestic violence’ and theft, ‘suspicious person’ and ‘vehicle theft’, with just about as many calls, and the mowing and clearing of some of the mess.
The other, a nice house, in what ought to be a nice neighborhood, but on the turn near a churchyard on one hand and a wilderness area on the other, has nightly ‘burglary’, ‘theft’, ‘assault’, and then ‘suicide’. More ‘theft’, ‘theft’, ‘drugs,’ nightly, ‘fight,’ ‘assault,’ and latest, ‘attempted suicide.’ Sheesh!
Then the avenue, which has no houses: ‘dui,’ ‘auto theft’, ‘malicious mischief’, ‘fight,’ ‘fight,’ ‘robbery,’ ‘fight’, and ‘stolen goods’, and then a wild wreck that jumped a guard rail, went through a fence, landed on 2 cars, and sent one wheel half a block down the street—not ours, thank goodness. The speed limit is 35.
Want to find out what’s going on in your neighborhood? http://spotcrime.com/account.php is a signup for the police actions in your area.
After looking into sex offenders in my area I should probably just check myself in to the local jail for better neighbors. I think I preferred it before I knew. I live a couple blocks from a strip club and there is a strip mall down the other way that constantly gets robbed. Drive by shootings a couple blocks away. And we had an unsolved beating death from a blocks away last year. Yeah, I think I know about as much as I want to know. That’s just the stuff I see/hear or hits the news. I’m sure there is much much more.
I get decent rent prices though and my apartment neighbors are all teachers, nurses, djs etc. The bad part of town has migrated our direction over the years. Glad I never bought a house. Stuff like that would worry me.
I use the info to know what to watch for, in our high-trafficked neighborhood. Would I hesitate to call the cops just for a bunch of people walking up the avenue? Depends on who, the hour, and what I know about recent stuff. I’m a bit of a nosy neighbor in that department, but then, I’ve always lived in areas with neighborhood watch.
Well, I signed up. Hopefully the results won’t overflow my inbox. 🙂
Thanks! I just signed up to find out how my area does.
Sounds like the area I moved out of five years ago. Half the houses were abandoned, there were fights, shootings, dog-fighting, drugs–you name it. One night someone set a car on fire across the street from me…sending a message to the guy at that house, I believe. I bought a house across the city and things are not perfect here, but the neighborhood watch is very active and involved. Since I moved, an item turns up in the news about every two weeks in which a crime is reported on one of the streets in my old neighborhood. The saddest thing is that I grew up there, and 30-40 years ago it was a very different place. My father used to take long walks at night, alone. Now, I wouldn’t walk those same streets in broad daylight. No place is perfect, but I just want the odds to favor the good guys!
Our place is good, but it stays good because of good neighbors and the Cop-shops that dot Spokane, like the old precinct houses. We sent these ‘precinct’ guys a thank you recently, noting that they couldn’t have had break-time OR time for donut between calls to that one house. It’s their work that keeps this place nice.
Off topic, but perhaps interesting:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/8056237/Want-to-lose-weight-Turn-off-the-lights.html
Yep. I saw that one. Maybe I should turn off the telly at night.
We had a crack house on our street inhabited by a man named “Crazy Tony.” He had police visiting our neighborhood at all times of the day and night. One day the little girls from across the street came running home screaming “Crazy Tony is taking a shower in the hose!” sure enough! He was put in a safe home and the house sold as a fixer upper. It is much safer in out area because of that.
I live in a lovely, treelined area, a homelike apartment complex for 50+ with lots of green space, nestled in a very Midwestern setting of well-kept houses. You can almost smell the apple pies baking in all the kitchens.
Across the street from me, a woman’s adult son was running a meth lab from his bedroom. We had no clue until the police raid. The woman and her 2 younger sons are back in the home, did some remodeling, all tranquil again. But you never know what’s really happening in those kitchens!
My area is too rural register on this website. Reading this a twisted version of the Sesame Street song “Who Are The People In Your Neighborhood?” keeps running through my head.
Carolyn, so THAT’S why that curve’s guardrail was obliterated. I saw the damage but didn’t know accident details. When did it happen?
Wee hours, a day ago. Driver wasn’t wearing a seatbelt and was thrown out, fatally; passenger was, with life-threatening injuries. In a 35 mph zone.
Wheel halfway down Alice, as I gather, and cars and property taken out.
My area is too small, as well. Population is just around 30,000 for the urban portion, just under 50,000 for the entire county. Ah well, it was a nice try. I don’t really need to see what’s going on in Dayton, I get the newspaper from them, plus an online subscription. My neighbors to the east are fairly quiet, the neighbors to the west have a menagerie, including a burro which got loose last year. When the guy came over to my place to retrieve said burro, he wouldn’t even speak to me. Hey, you know, it is funny, I thought it was, even though he was “terribly inconvenienced” by having to chase the animal back and forth and around the place. He finally caught it when I stepped out into the side yard and the burro came to me. I don’t know how they treat the animals, I pretty much stay away from that area of the farm, so don’t have a good reason to call the sheriff.
Yep, country living has its conventions, such as asking, “How much did my livestock eat, and thank you for the call.” Hermits who don’t talk are not nice neighbors.
We are also too rural for the website. The few houses on my side of the mile stretch are back from the road; it’s mostly state management area. Once in a great while we have parties rowdy parties in the woods. Since we all have a dislike of fires, the DEM is usually summoned pretty quickly and the offenders rounded up’ One such incident usually keeps the lid on thing for a few years. 8)
We used to live on the lake, and for a while there was a family who thought they had private license to have picnics and build fires on the tiny island in the middle. And they’d perform—ahem!—ordinarily private functions into the lake on the side of the island right in front of our picture windows in broad daylight. I was SOOOOO tempted to take a photo, blow it up and post it on the sign outside our neighborhood….
The driver without the seatbelt, while it’s tragic, it’s also nature’s way of weeding out the gene pool. People who feel they shouldn’t have to wear seatbelts should be ready to accept the consequences. Likewise, they shouldn’t expect the police and fire department to clean up the mess for free.
If the people involved were not also indulging in something, their decision to shoot the 35 mph s-curve at speeds sufficient to shred a car and endanger nearby houses was made with all intellectual powers brought to bear. I feel sorry for them and theirs, but I also feel sorry for the innocent neighborhood residents who had two cars destroyed and a very terrible scene dumped on their lawn.
The worst case in our neighborhood was a ‘crack house’ that was raided by the police, bank repo’d, cleaned up, and resold about the time we bought our house. No new issues since. We bought into an older neighborhood; the worst problem we encounter on a regular basis is the neighbors across our back fence and kitty-corner and their love of barbecue, often several times weekly. Sometimes this involves whole animals; the smoke, especially when they are singing off hair, is remarkable. The back fence neighbors have a large extended family and have frequent big parties. We come home from Saturday outings at 11:00 at night and can hear them playing bingo in Tongan.
Lol—Tonga! One of the concessions at the Mariner games at Safeco is run by a Tongan family. And I understand barbecue is a biggie! But if you could wangle an invite (if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em—) it might be good. Maybe you should just march over with a big fruit salad and say you’d be happy to trade for a slice of bbq!
Tell them to either keep the noise and the smoke down or invite you over to the barbecue!
x2
There’s not a lot we can do about the smoke; it goes, well, wherever. Many times I’m working in my back yard, and someone will call over the back fence and ask if I want help; the drawback to this is that it’s help for pay, as I discovered. Most times I’d rather do the raking myself for free and get in some exercise. Despite frequent pig roasts, the Tongans are actually not bad neighbors at all. They participate in a church choir that apparently performs mostly Tongan music, and listening to them harmonize during those night gatherings is pretty amazing. Noise isn’t really a factor because their house is several small units arranged in a U shape around their back courtyard, which faces our hedge. The hedge is pretty effective as a noise barrier, and our bedroom is on the other side of the house — you wouldn’t think that street side would be quieter, but it is. We got more noise from the house next door when they were working 2nd shift, and their evening parties began about 11:00 p.m.
I live in an inner city neighborhood, which has a reputation for quiet and transients (there’s a drop-in center seven blocks south of me, and a rehab center 15 blocks northeast.) There are drug dealers, but no meth labs (that I know of): the labs and the grow-ops in this city are mostly in the outer suburbs, where brand-new houses are bought for those purposes.
There are two incidents for my immediate area (three block radius) that qualify as ‘interesting’. The first was in February a couple of years ago. I woke up to “Bang! BANG BANG BANG BANG!”
Blink. Was that real or a really lucid dream? It was about five minutes to my alarm, so I got up and turned on the news, which was running, “People are warned to stay away from Fifth and Third, where police have surrounded a house containing a man with a gun…”
I live on Fifth and Fifth. (Everyone lived. The guy went to the hospital, but the news reports I saw didn’t mention what injury he’d had.)
The other incident was lots of cop cars outside on the street. I watched them for a while, then went and did some work on my computer. Five hours later, the cops were still there, this time with canine units.
It turned out to be a kidnapping from the condo complex across the street from me. Guy gets taken for a ride by a couple of other guys; the girlfriend calls the cops. Much searching for several hours, and then the guys bring the first guy home, and EVERYONE shuts up. (I guess that means the ‘talk’ went well.)
I can, and do, walk this neighborhood in the dead of night. My biggest complaint is the fire department–they obviously rely on Google Maps, or something similar, and I know the extant map for Fifth Avenue is wrong (it shows a connection to Sixth Street as a road–but it’s really a set of stairs. Not advisable to drive a ladder truck up those…)
Wow—that’s a neighborhood! The first neighborhood I moved into had a convicted felon and her boyfriends across the street catty-angled, and a cop, Robert, next door to me. When she had trouble with the bfs, she’d call Robert, whose wife was always thrilled to have him walk into one of the most dangerous kind of calls there is—domestic dispute. Finally Robert moved off, and left us with Sally, who had a ‘maid,’ as she called the near 6 foot tall woman who lived with her—also with a record. The two of them flung the manager of a store through a plate glass window when accosted for shoplifting. And then the boyfriends showed up. Did I mention she had kids? Two wily little Artful Dodgers, personable kids, who I saw (when gunfire erupted on the front lawn Saturday morning as a bf was trying to take a car from Sally)—the maid had the gun, the kids were running for the front door, and when the shooting started, did these savvy kids cry or freeze? Heck no, they dodged around for the back of the house while the maid fired in the general direction of the bf—I should have been below the brickwork at that moment, but I was watching the direction of her aim. Then Sally seized by the handle the suitcase, dropped on the lawn, began using it to bludgeon the windows of the car as the bf attempted to back out. I thought they might shoot the tires, but they didn’t, and the bf got away with the car.
There was a family moving in two doors away, and during all of this drama, the furniture kept coming out of the van and into the house…
Some moments are just too surreal.
my goodness! nothing like that around here … the occasional stray sheep …. we are deeply rural and a big holiday area. but even when I lived in newcastle, a northern city with a bit of a rep, the worst that happened was a drunk walking up the street with a brick late one night, knocking off all the parked cars’ side mirrors. one night some clowns picked up my citroen 2CV and dumped it in the middle of the road for a joke, the police had to get me out of bed to replace it in its parking slot. oh, and then I moved to another studenty area and an irish student in the house opposite decided to dismantle the house from the inside while very drunk, plus throwing a few cap stones from the rather handsome walls on the street.
You got me curious, so I looked up the crime stats for the town I live in.
Found out I have 2 registered sex offenders living within a half mile of me. One is the father of the little brat that did $1,400 worth of vandalism my truck. And the city crime index went from 355.9 in 1999 to 691.2 in 2007.
Thanks CJ, I knew where I lived seemed to be going downhill, but probably didn’t need to see it in black and white.
@Xenophon, did you ever collect on the damages? Aside from the fact the kid was trespassing, vandalizing, and generally being a nuisance, then his father with his “so what” attitude…..too bad you don’t have video of the kid doing the destruction, you could post it on YouTube for the world to see, not to mention put something on the video that refers to the father’s er, “status”…..just a thought…..
Joe,
No, nothing yet. The wheels of justice turn slowly when they do at all, and sometimes they require “grease” to move. The high crime rate here does not only extend to the populace. The county sheriff’s dept and local gov have had some shady dealings too, past and present.
I submitted the estimate to the States Attorneys office and that was the last I heard. I sent out a letter asking for an update a couple of weeks ago and have not heard back yet. So I’m assuming they refused to pay and now will have to see if the State’s Attorney will pursue criminal charges.
For someone who fought in Panama and the Gulf, then came home to be in federal service, before finally going whistle blower on corruption and resigning in disgust, guess this is par for the course.
Makes me wonder what I did it all for sometimes… When a redneck pedophile or prisoner seems to have more rights than someone who put his life on the line, served faithfully and loyalty, then choose to resign over violating his integrity and oath.
So who knows if anything will ever be done. I just try to be the best human I can and try not to worry about those who aren’t. Unless I am given the opportunity to change things for the better, then I do my damnedest regardless of the consequences.
@Xenophon, re: Military Service
“It’s a dirty job but somebody has to do it.” Thanks for your time spent protecting us all.