ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, September 28, 1996 TAG: 9609300012
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-9 EDITION: METRO
MURDER and mayhem get the ink. They draw the police resources. When FBI reports come out on crime rates (which, encouragingly, have been dropping lately), it is serious crimes to which they refer.
The focus is understandable, and not inappropriate. Time and money are not infinite: Priorities have to be set, choices made.
But this doesn't mean that lesser offenses - public drunkenness, vagrancy and the like - are unimportant.
To be sure, such violations, taken alone, are trivial in a way that violent crime is not. Nor do they as a rule have specific victims in the way that violent crimes do.
But crime also has another, more generalized kind of victim - the sense of security and freedom that's lost when folks get wary about venturing out at certain times of the night, or about traveling down certain streets, or about allowing their children to walk to the corner store.
Let public drunkenness and its kin get too persistent, become too prevalent, and they can create this indirect kind of victim as surely as can violent crime.
And, again like violent crime, an abundance of this lesser crime can feed on itself, hastening the deterioration of neighborhoods and the flight of stable families from them.
So our sympathy - and our salute - to Christine Proffitt, the Southeast Roanoke woman who complained loudly enough about winos near her home to get the attention of top city officials. She complained in a letter to the editor, published on this page a couple of weeks ago and signed by Proffitt, her husband and 25 others.
The sympathy is for what Proffitt has had to put up with. There's the boarded-up house behind hers, its yard overgrown with weeds, that the winos apparently (and apparently illegally) occupied. There's the public urination and solicitations for sex that she says her children have witnessed, and the gantlet of panhandlers that must be run just to get to the neighborhood convenience store.
The salute is for Proffitt's making an issue of it. She's no professional agitator or political activist. She's a home-health aide who's trying to raise kids with her husband, a roofer.
As such, she's following in the footsteps of other Roanokers - for instance, the Wasena residents who fought drug trafficking in their neighborhood, the folks on Day Avenue who've worked to rid their neighborhood of criminal activity, the people in Lincoln Terrace whose cooperation helped make community policing there a success - who also know that crime is bad for neighborhoods as well as for its individual victims.
This is not a call for vigilantism. Success comes from working with police, not against them. But while the city, and the law, are necessary ingredients, livable communities depend first on residents who care enough about their neighborhoods to complain about and combat threats to their cleanliness and safety.
LENGTH: Medium: 57 linesby CNB