Keeping Lid on Crime

Back in the early ‘70s, a high-ranking official with the New York Police Department described the cops who patrolled the south Bronx as an “occupational force.”

The best they could hope for, he said, was to “contain and keep the lid on.”

But he went on to make a prophetic observation that poverty, unemployment, drugs and the lack of any real opportunity to climb above them, were breeding a larger and larger population of people who had virtually no stake in society.

He spoke of a class of denied citizens for whom the laws of the land meant nothing, because the values upon which they are based did not apply to them.

He also spoke of the “good citizens” outside the “fire zone” who were content to close their eyes to the problem because the cancer was localized and didn’t infect them. Well, it seems the lid has finally blown off.

If we’ve already put the April riots behind us, all we need do now is take a drive down Ventura Boulevard. Begin at Laurel Canyon and make your way west. See the growing cancer of gang graffiti that now adorns walls, windows, poles, bus benches, fences and even the trees. On restaurants, banks, trucks, retail shops--it’s everywhere.

And have you taken a real good look at our freeway signs lately? Paint over it and it’s back the very next day. And now, they’ve learned to scratch it into windows. Like a fungus that refuses to die.

Who was it that said, “Let them get away with shooting spray paint and before long they’ll be shooting bullets?”

The police can’t stop crime, anymore than the military can stop wars. The faster we keep moving toward a two-caste system in this country, the worse it will get. And the more we close our eyes to it in the hopes that it stops before it hits our upscale neighborhood, the more we become part of the problem.

FRANK V. FURINO

Sherman Oaks