There goes the Neighborhood

There are times when I like to sit back on my screen porch and watch the occasional boat or passing watercraft motor by on the Appomattox River below. There’s something sort of pristine to it, like a Norman Rockwell painting. It burns into your head like a negative, and you think life really doesn’t get much better than this.

Home, family, friends, and that “peaceful easy feeling” The Eagles sang about. That’s life in these United States, or at least that was life in these United States. But today, suddenly things are different. There’s a darker pallor to the clouds and the silver linings need some polish. Places that used to be safe are safe no more. And places where we used to be free to roam, now require a sceptic’s eye and a non-trusting soul.

There have been any number of hints. Bank robberies, store robberies, and stick ups started to crop up a few years ago with a bit of regularity that we never faced in this small, quiet burg we call Colonial Heights before. It started with a rumor here and there about people breaking into homes, and people assuming someone’s identity and then actually breaking into the house of the person whose identity they had stolen.

Sure it’s disconcerting. The bad things of city life that never seemed to work their way into this quiet town now seem to have found us, and with us they have found an easy victim. We are an insulated lot of people, we 17,500 souls who have invested our lives and livelihood in the community. But the community has changed. It’s a classic paradigm shift, like the end of the horse and buggy age.

So say bye-bye to our own version of Mayberry RFD. You won’t find Andy hanging around, and the lazy sleepy days of sitcom life are now long gone. When a snake finds its way into Eden, it’s time to pay attention.

Attention is exactly what the citizens of Colonial Heights need to be paying right now. There has been a sudden rash of evil in the community of late. In the past month, a pair of criminals waited outside a local bank for an easy target to walk by. They followed their victim to her home and then robbed her at gun point. A short time later, the same two bad guys pulled the same kind of crime again, this time a mere two blocks from where they robbed the woman. This time, the victim was shot.

Wake up Colonial Heights!

By good fortune, the police department had increased patrols in the area and they spotted the two speeding on their way out of the subdivision. The white hats (okay, so maybe blue hats) chased down the speeder, only to find out that the two were wanted for the robbery.

But it doesn’t end there. I was told there had been another armed robbery incident in the same subdivision since the two were arrested.

Scared yet? Then there’s this incident. Two young men in our church youth group left the meeting two weeks ago, stopped by a fast food restaurant for a quick snack, and then headed home on foot. On their way home someone pops up with a pistol and before you can say, Go Colonials, our guys are out their phones and Ipod, and wallets.

In the past, we have witnessed such actions in some of the areas around the state. In most cases, they were bigger cities, sporting higher crime rates, and other problems that seem to abound in larger cities. They never seemed to end up on our front steps. Metaphorically, we could point our fingers at the papers and say, ‘Look how bad things are over there.” We can’t say that anymore. We have to be a much more wary group. Predators are about, and like any group, we have to start paying more attention to our surroundings. What happens to your neighbor can certainly happen to us. And in such a small city like this, everyone is a neighbor. Neighborhood watch be darned, we need to start looking out for everyone who lives here. We need to get back to the sense of small town that is what made Colonial Heights the third best city to live in in Virginia.

The onus is upon us. Don’t wait for the Citizen’s Night Out, start paying attention to your streets now and do not fear calling the police. After all, who else will look out for us?