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.