Thinking aloud on this one. Or writing aloud, whatever.
My office is right in the middle of downtown Lancaster, and on Tuesdays and Fridays I’m over at market - Meck’s, mostly - and down to the bank or the drugstore or even the pawn shop at the end of the block down by Prince Street, looking for cheap guitars. And it’s all perfectly safe, I’ve never felt otherwise. My experience of “city life” is, well, fine.
But I don’t live in the neighborhoods. And depending on which city neighborhood you live in, your mileage may vary considerably.
One woman I work with who lives not too far from Manor Street now carries and industrial-strength pepper spray canister and has been out at the shooting range with her .38. And if that seems a bit paranoid, you should perhaps hear her stories. Drug dealing going on right out in the open, gunshots on a regular basis.
That may be a worst-case scenario, and indeed her neighborhood may qualify as one of the worst in the city. Then again, reading citydweller’s comments in this thread, you think, well, it isn’t isolated in the “bad” neighborhoods. Because I know where he lives, and while it may not be swank, it is indeed right in the heart of “revitalized” Lancaster. But I also get my hair cut on the same block and the guy who owns the shop tells tales that make it stand on end.
Statistics show things are getting worse, and since the beginning of May, in particular, it’s as if Lancaster has become a shooting gallery. The guy who shot his ex-girlfriend and four members of her family last weekend. A man shot in the head on Church Street at 4:15 a.m. last Saturday morning. The Days Inn shooting; the Days Inn is techically in Manheim Township, but for all intents and purposes may as well be in the city, and the shooter and all three victims were from the city. Donte Hammond, shot and killed on Juniata Street May 7; a 2-year-old girl wounded. A shooting on South Prince Street and another on New Dorwart Street, both on May 5. A woman shot on Almanac Avenue May 1.
Ironically, on May 8 an article ran in which city officials said they were “fed up” with the shootings. In the six months prior to may, the piece reported, there had been 21 shootings in the city, with four dead.
If anything, it seems as if the pace of the violence has quickened since city officials announced they were ”fed up.”
City officials, the mayor, maybe the police chief, are sensitive I think to the idea that the city is a shooting gallery. It isn’t. As I mentioned at the outset, it isn’t like you walk the streets of the downtown looking over your shoulder, waiting for someone to bust off a few shots.
They’re concerned, obviously, that an erroneous perception creates an image of Lancaster as the Wild West, which will be detrimental to attracting additional economic development - in the area of the convention center and everywhere else.
Yet at the same time - it’s more than just a perception. Something is happening here, and most disconcerting about the Era article today was that officials can’t really put their finger on exactly what it is. When they can’t do that, they can’t solve the problem. Which does indeed mean it’s out of control.
We talk about guns, we talk about gangs. But in his LOL post, I think citydweller is absolutely right - this is a class issue. It’s a race issue to the extent that the blacks and Latinos doing the shootings are of the underclass. Essentially, you have a tremendous amount of poor Latino and to a lesser extent black families in the city, you have children having children, you have fathers who are not around and thus kids who are growing up without any paternal role models - Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote about all of this 42 years ago. It’s still happening. We really don’t talk about it.
At the same time, drugs are obviously a factor - so too, I suspect, is the perception among those from Philly or Baltimore that Lancaster is a podunk town, ripe for the picking. There have been a significant number of people from Philadelphia involved in shootings here. Philadelphia has more homicides this year than New York, Chicago or Los Angeles. Maybe we’re becoming a “bedroom community” in more ways than one.
I’m going to write about this for the print edition this week, maybe the perception versus reality aspect. It is the topic du jour, these shootings just keep on happening and the summer’s only just begun. It is going to be a long, hot one.
