Southern Florida: riots, refugees, and now a crime wave
HELP FIGHT CRIME: BUY GUNS, urge bumper stickers on cars along Miami’s Flagler Street. To attract new depositors, the city’s Lincoln Savings and Loan Association offers not toasters or blenders, but pocket cans of spray repellent. Newly acquired Doberman guard dogs growl inside increasing numbers of Bade County homes; sales of sophisticated burglar alarm systems and rudimentary iron bars for doors are booming. Says a Miami policeman: “Sometimes I think I’m in Dodge City.”
Such are the signs of a crime wave that is surging through southern Florida. Crime rates are continuing to climb nationwide: in 1979, according to FBI statistics, the overall rate of serious crime (murder, robbery, forcible rape and theft) jumped 9% over 1978, and for the first six months of 1980 it rose by 10% over the same period last year. But southern Florida has a special problem. In Miami overall crime jumped 21% during the first half of 1980 over 1979 figures; the murder rate alone soared 70%, from 134 in all of 1979 to 201 so far this year. Says Miami Beach Commissioner Alex Daoud: “An absolute war is being fought in our streets at night.”
At stake is more than just public safety. Miami has already been buffeted this year by race riots in its impoverished Liberty City district and by the influx of more than 100,000 Cuban refugees; the region cannot afford to let its image slip further. The lucrative winter resort season, which last year brought the state $16 billion, is about to begin again. Tales from the Miami police blotter have already reached Britain, which, at least until now, was expected to send a record 200,000 tourists to the state by year’s end. Proclaimed the London Daily Express last month: “Florida’s holiday paradise has become the holiday murder capital of the world.”
Officials tick off familiar reasons for the crime epidemic, such as poverty (in Dade County—which includes Miami, Miami Beach and other communities—18% of the families live on annual incomes of less than $7,500) and a nonhomogeneous population (in Dade County 45% white, 38% Hispanic and 17% black). In addition, many blame the newly arrived Cubans and a shortage of police in the fast-growing region. Miami alone has 50 positions unfilled in its 650-member force.
Local authorities are taking a host of emergency measures to combat crime. The Miami city commission has budgeted $100,000 for an advertising program to attract 150 new police recruits. Though the Miami Beach city commission refused to approve a proposed 11 p.m. curfew, it did adopt a temporary ordinance that allows policemen to stop and frisk anyone suspected of having committed or intending to commit a crime. The commission also voted an interim ordinance against congregating “in a manner that blocks sidewalks or threatens the safety of property or persons,” and closed the city’s beaches and parks between 10 p.m. and sunrise during November.
Many southern Floridians continue to wage their own war on crime. Nearly two dozen merchants in Miami’s downtown shopping district chip in $150 a month to fund nightly patrols of uniformed guards equipped with nightsticks. Citizens are flocking to local gun stores to arm themselves; in the twelve-month period ending Sept. 30, more than 40,000 handguns were sold in Dade County, up from 29,000 in the preceding twelve months. “Most customers are people like your mother,” says one gun shop owner. “They’re just average, everyday folks who want to continue to live.”
Some of those “folks” are flocking to the Tamiami Range and Gun Shop, where Steve Tomlin, 29, teaches a $25 course on how to protect yourself with a gun. Since instruction began last May, more than 500 customers, mostly women, have taken the three-hour course. “I am here to teach you how to kill,” says Tomlin to his students. For the first two hours, Tomlin lectures on state firearms laws and how to shoot intruders. Among his tips: use a .38-caliber pistol (“It’s the best for getting the job done”); assume all burglars are armed; and never shoot someone on your lawn (“Wait for them to get inside before you open up”). Tomlin follows up with an hour of instruction on the range. “My sister’s home was just broken into,” says Albert Vidaud, 32, a Miami mailman, explaining why he and his wife Becky, 30, enrolled. “When that happened it really made me think. We put in extra locks, but I don’t know if that’s enough.” Says Edna Buchanan, a crime reporter for the Miami Herald: “If everyone in Dade County took this course, it would certainly be a safer place to live.”
So far this year, at least 32 suspected criminals have been shot to death by gun-toting citizens. After Joseph Petrillo, 35, shot and killed a 14-year-old suspected burglar caught ransacking his Carol City home, the boy’s mother sobbed: “I can’t blame the man. If somebody had been in my house and I had a gun, I might have shot him too.”
But arming the populace is hardly the most sensible way to combat crime, and indeed may foster rather than prevent violence. As guns proliferate, quarrels that once finished with harsh words or punches now stand a greater chance of ending in bullets. Yet few southern Florida authorities are speaking out against the boom in gun ownership. In fact, many local policemen rather irresponsibly encourage residents to carry firearms. “If someone is confronted with a life-or-death situation,” says Captain Marshall Frank of the Dade County department of public safety, “they should do anything to protect their lives.”
Citizens would do better to follow the example of the 75,000 southern Floridians who belong to Citizens Crime Watch (C.C.W.), a nonprofit neighborhood corporation that works closely with local police departments. When a C.C.W. member spots a crime in progress, he telephones the police as well as his block captain and two other volunteers. Each of those three calls another three members, and so on until all the volunteers in the neighborhood are notified. Armed with pencils and notebooks instead of .38s, the crime watchers jot down details of the crime and suspects before the police arrive. Local authorities give the program high marks. “It’s fantastic,” says one South Miami policeman. “I wish I had a hundred of them.” And without guns, the C.C.W. manages to be the area’s most genuine example of law and order.
—By James Kelly Reported by Michael Wallis/Miami
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