okay
so how serious is the subject of crime in your area
well needless to say here in Washington DC this is the war zone
uh DC around here stands for drug capital or death capital
it's uh it's really bad here uh for example the uh local high school uh they've already found two students with sawed off shotguns
jeez
and they're starting to uh get these hand held metal detectors so they can inspect the kids every morning when they come to school of all things
so it
well luckily it hasn't gotten that bad here uh San Jose actually has a pretty good record in terms of being relatively low on violent crime
uh-huh
uh-huh
uh but it's on the uprise especially in a lot of the uh outlying agricultural towns
uh-huh
uh because you end up having a lot of gangs forming uh largely around the Hispanic core
uh-huh
uh it seems to be that uh gang warfare follows very rapidly on the heels of poverty conditions
uh-huh right that's how they uh they bind themselves together in groups i guess and uh now the interestingly enough i don't think we have here a a lot of gangs but uh
yeah
only a couple uh of not a whole large group of them but uh just a few most of them centered around uh drug territory
uh-huh
uh-huh
and so they're protecting their economic interests i guess and uh now nowadays the latest thing i've i've read about in the paper here that they're doing as far as
yeah
uh crimes involving stealing cars is that instead of stealing uh cars like at night breaking into them or whatever they will pick out a car that they want and wait until you show up
and then as you get out of the car they just uh step up and uh take the keys off of you and drive the car away and leave you standing in front of your house
oh well that's efficient
yeah that's the uh latest thing that way there's no damage to the car or anything they just wait for you to show up after they've picked out which one they want
they're decided they're completely unworried about being identified or anything of that sort
uh-huh right just wait for you to drive to your house you get out and they get in off they go with your car
wow
so it's uh i think they call it car jacking around here
yeah yeah i'd heard that phrase
uh-huh yeah that's kind of the latest thing but oh every year in the DC area it gets progressively worse as far as the number of homicides so it's
uh it's unfortunate that we feel sometimes even that we have to bring our kids up in this area because we're not from around here we're from uh i'm from Ohio and my wife's from Florida so
uh-huh
and we've just come from twenty years in the military and uh which is an entirely different environment so this is a whole new thing for for us to to have to put up with and it's uh really scary sometimes
yeah there aren't that many places that are safe from that sort of thing nowadays
right and it's pretty bad when they're using metal detectors in school and uh of course the mayor uh of DC is having a real problem uh
uh-huh
trying to what do you do to to reduce crime in a in a major city like DC where it's a way of life for everybody it's uh
i would hate to have to wrestle with that problem i don't know what what the solution is uh there's no way they can stop the drugs and that's what's causing all the killing
well uh there's a couple of things that i've heard uh most of them are fairly uh radical in terms of what you'd have to do uh
uh-huh
uh-huh
course the the reason that that these kids tend to to turn toward the drugs and everything else seems seems to be just you know the the the
end results of of poverty and and parents that aren't doing any parenting and everything else because i mean you know the parents aren't making a living at anything
uh-huh
right and they see all their friends and neighbors uh
uh
and they're accidental parents half the time anyway
yeah and their friends are driving Mercedes and so it's actually they grow up with that as their way of life and uh i think uh to a large extent they don't understand the concept that what they're doing is actually illegal because
this is the way they were raised
it's illegal but it's not wrong because all their friends do it
right exactly so maybe it's the law that wrong in their eyes and they they say well it's
yeah
it's the law that's uh got to be changed instead of their way of life so i don't know it's
i'm glad it's not the kind of problem i have to come up with an answer to because it's not easy
well i think that the drug thing would actually be relatively easy to solve in terms of of an actual solution to the problem um
uh-huh
the the social the other social problems wouldn't wouldn't go away
right they've always been with us
uh
i mean there's there's been a lot of
and i used to think that this whole argument was completely bogus but then the more i thought about it the more sense it made is that uh alcohol is as bad a drug as anything else
uh-huh
uh-huh
uh and prohibition didn't stop it and didn't do anything really to slow
right
