Arrests at Last!

Breathe. Good news came yesterday.

For the last several weeks, I've been getting reports of nearby robberies. (I read a midtown blog regularly, and I receive a weekly emails from my neighborhood association; that email details local crime.) These robberies haven't been in my immediate vicinity, but close enough to cause personal alarm.

See, I live in a neighborhood called the Evergreen Historic District. On the northest area of this neighborhood sits Rhodes College. That's where these robberies have occurred--right around there.

The targeted victim has been someone who was out exercising or walking a dog in the dark--mostly around 8 or 9 pm. The suspects were described as a group of three or four young men, all wearing hoodies, using a sawed-off shotgun. They had robbed a woman walking her dog, but she didn't have anything. (I don't carry anything while walking Howard either.) But a few men have been robbed, and their wallets and cell phones were taken. (What's scary here is that one robber demanded the lock code for a cell phone; I don't know mine, and I'm sure I wouldn't know it with a sawed-off shot gun being pointed at me!)

Now, I don't walk Howard in the dark--one major reason I found a house with a fenced-in back yard. (And there's a lock on my gate going into the backyard.) But I do get home from the gym a couple of nights a week around 8. And so I have tried to get myself in the habit of really checking out the area before I get out of my car. (Several robberies around midtown have occurred as people pull up to their houses and are getting out of their cars.) I always have my front porch light on, and my neighbors to the north do too, which is especially nice because their bushes provide quite a hiding spot form my point of sight; but not so much as long as their light is on. And my front porch is wide open--not a good place to commit a crime.

Anyway, about six people were arrested yesterday in connection with this particular string of robberies, and what good news! No doubt, those kids over at Rhodes are quite happy too.

Memphis has awful crime stats---number 1 on the FBI's list of most violent crime per capita. But this can serve as a reminder to everyone to check out your surroundings. Know what's going on around you. Know what is normal, and know when something is happening that's out of the ordinary.