Johnny_Blaze_47
10-30-2006, 04:24 PM
I'm surprised there haven't been any discussions here about this.
----------------
Katrina crime: Perceived or real?
Web Posted: 10/29/2006 12:49 AM CDT
Todd Bensman
Express-News Staff
Just days after the first of about 30,000 Louisiana hurricane evacuees began arriving in San Antonio, Mayor Phil Hardberger was asked a simple question he laughingly brushed off. What might be the impact of the influx on city crime rates and services?
It was Sept. 7, 2005, and the mayor was riding high on national praise for a CNN appearance during which he had projected an image of his city as unflinchingly philanthropic. People displaced by Katrina still were flooding in.
"That's like if my house is on fire and I'm looking to you for a bucket of water, and you ask what the new house will look like," he said with a laugh. "Everybody's been worried about crime, and the impact on social services. But so far, it is just worry; it hasn't been factual."
More than a year later, the issue remains unaddressed, conspicuously so in light of a 55 percent spike in murders the first eight months of this year, increasing violent crime rates in San Antonio, a stretched police force and widespread media reports linking some evacuees in Houston to similar crime trends there.
So: Did the sudden arrival of about 30,000 evacuees, a group equal to Del Rio in population, cause additional crime? The question, loaded with the kind of politically sensitive racial implications that can discomfit some politicians, is much more than academic. Millions of dollars could be at stake.
In choosing not to ask, San Antonio's political leadership potentially turned its back on federal money that Houston has gained by citing an evacuee link to a increasing murder rate and other violent crime.
It also invites speculation and perceptions not necessarily grounded in fact.
City leaders, such as Hardberger, several council members and top police officials, assert the evacuees have had no effect on crime. Those who interact most closely with some of the city's highest concentrations of evacuees, including beat cops, business owners and the evacuees themselves, say the opposite is true.
The San Antonio Express-News spent four months trying to determine whether a link exists between evacuees and crime in San Antonio. Among the highlights were an extensive analysis of crime data and interviews with dozens of street-level officers, community leaders, business owners, residents and evacuees throughout the city:
Steeply declining rates of violent crime and property crime during the first eight months of 2005 suddenly reversed after they arrived, although there is no proof evacuees caused it. Houston, however, has successfully cited a similar coincidence of suddenly rising crime to argue for more federal money.
Crime hot spots developed after evacuees arrived in and around some of the 170 apartment complexes where they resettled. For example, one 10-mile stretch of W.W. White Road contributed 20 percent of a citywide spike in armed robberies last fall. In contrast, at least one complex had lower crime after relatively large numbers of evacuees moved in, based on several measures of crime.
Of the 55 percent spike in San Antonio's murders this year, three suspects and two victims were found to be evacuees. Several other cases have suspected links, but dozens of cases could neither be included nor excluded as related to evacuees. Unlike Houston, the San Antonio Police Department homicide unit never has been asked to methodically look for such a connection that could be cited in a request for federal funds.
Violence and criminal activity involving evacuees occurred as the result of interaction between San Antonio residents and the new arrivals, often over drugs.
A coincidence of crime
The Louisiana evacuees found much more than a welcoming refuge when they showed up in need at San Antonio's doorstep last summer. Compared with their crime-ridden neighborhoods back home, evacuees found relative peace and security here. Most came from the same few districts responsible for making New Orleans notorious as the nation's most lethally violent city.
But San Antonio had been enjoying eight months of double-digit downturns in serious crime, such as murder, robbery and rape and sexual assaults, when the newcomers began settling into local shelters and hotels on Sept. 2, 2005.
Then the trend, for reasons unknown, reversed significantly in certain categories of crime. By Christmas 2005, San Antonio was beset by double-digit rises in the kind of crime that residents in any city especially fear and loathe.
Compared with the September-to-December period a year earlier, armed robberies of businesses were up 42 percent, and of people up 18 percent. Vehicle theft was up 18 percent, and weapons violations 33 percent, to name a few.
The number of residents' calls for police ballooned and is now on track to set a record by breaking the 1 million mark this year, with an average 8,500 more calls for police per month from September 2005 through July 30 than the same period a year earlier. The swell began just after evacuees arrived, taxing street cops and stretching response times.
The Houston metropolitan area, which received five times as many evacuees but is three times the size of the San Antonio area, experienced a similar coincidence of higher crime after evacuees arrived on a comparative scale.
Neither Houston nor the Express-News was able to examine the only unassailable evidence that would link imported criminal elements to higher crime: last known addresses for either suspects or victims. Many crimes remain unsolved with no suspects to identify.
The absence of suspect arrests and publicly available information that would prove an evacuee link to specific crimes has left some crime victims to draw their own conclusions.
Ed Theo Flores, owner of the family-run Theo's Brake and Tire Service near downtown for 40 years, had experienced only one crime in the business' history, and that was two decades ago. In a few weeks after more than 50 evacuee families moved into the hotel next door to his shop, Flores reported three cars stolen off his lot and a break-in that cost him hundreds of dollars in tools. No arrests were made.
"I'm not blaming anything on the Katrina people," Flores said, choosing his words carefully. "I'm just saying the coincidence is right there."
The hotel did have problems with the evacuees. It was forced to evict a third of the guests for drugs and prostitution, said Janice Maragakis, spokeswoman for hotel owner Accor North America. Police reports confirm an increase in arrests at the address.
More than half of the city's evacuee population now is gone, having begun trickling out of town when Federal Emergency Management Agency housing vouchers started running out last spring, officials report. The overall total crime rate citywide has tapered off.
Today, top police officials are quick to highlight that total crime doesn't look bad.
From September 2005 through July, total crime citywide was up only 2.3 percent and total violent crime came out about even.
"The big picture is that violent crime is down," Police Chief William McManus said.
But total citywide numbers touted by police officials don't tell what happened for many months in neighborhoods after evacuees settled in them.
The period from September 2005 through July shows that several crime categories remained in double-digit higher territory over the same period a year earlier. Those include drug crimes, up 14 percent; total aggravated robberies, up 27 percent; and vehicle theft, up 17 percent.
Open to debate
Houston's attempt to peg a statistical correlation of higher crime rates to the arrival of evacuees has brought in millions of dollars to help pay its police and fire bills. But that city's correlation — and the Express-News' attempt to replicate Houston's analysis — is open to debate.
Criminologist Dr. Peter Scharf, director of the University of New Orleans Center for Society, Law and Justice, said the newspaper's findings, as well as Houston's, of the apparent shifts in the crime trends are "highly probative," suggesting some degree of proof.
"I think you're on to something," Scharf said after examining the Express-News findings. "And the lack of curiosity in your town is really interesting."
Scharf is studying the migration of people from the nation's most criminally prolific districts in New Orleans to Texas and back. He said it helps no one to casually dismiss what to him is an obvious pattern in which violent crime has followed one of the most dangerous criminal underclasses in the country.
It is likely no coincidence, Scharf also said, that crime rates in New Orleans fell from the nation's highest to nearly zero when just those few flooded high-crime districts emptied into Texas. Now, New Orleans crime is approaching old highs — in new areas — as evacuees settle in them, Scharf said.
Still, he cautioned that correlating a short-term crime spike with the arrival of evacuees is at best a crude barometer justifying more study and cannot be used to rule out other possible causes of a crime trend.
Other criminologists go further.
"I think saying that comes pretty close to demonizing people who were evacuated. All you can say is that's interesting, that went up," said Dr. Michael J. Gilbert, associate professor in the University of Texas at San Antonio criminal justice department and Mayor Phil Hardberger's appointee to a local crime commission.
"While that's perfectly rational thinking, it may be misleading in terms of what this data may actually mean. I think they're (city of Houston) trying to make the best case they can to get money when it's not defensible."
He and other experts say the coincidence that a sudden spike in major crime occurred with the arrival of evacuees might easily be explained by population increases, shifts in police tactics or changing drug trade dynamics.
Albert Steven Dietz, a criminal justice professor at Texas State University in San Marcos, said the post-September crime rate jumps in San Antonio indicate to him that some evacuees may have contributed out of proportion to their numbers — but for just the first few months of their residency.
He said a logical assumption is that the simple crime trend becomes less indicative after evacuees disburse throughout the city and, for instance, find opportunities to leave the criminal underworld, if they were part of it.
Is perception reality?
While nearly impossible to easily verify the origins of all arrestees through available public records, a perception accompanies the pattern of increasing crime: Based in truth or not, some people who interact closely with evacuees believe elements of that imported population are committing the crimes. Among them are police, prosecutors, apartment complex managers, neighboring residents and business owners.
Perhaps most credibly, though, evacuees themselves in a dozen apartment complexes told the Express-News they believe some in their own ranks are responsible for violence, thievery and drug dealing that have made their own law-abiding lives in San Antonio as miserable as they were in New Orleans.
Among those who came to San Antonio were at least 140 probationers and parolees from Louisiana who hadn't reported to a parole or probation officer in either Texas or their home state, the Express-News reported in July.
Evacuees in the Huntley Manor apartments in East San Antonio, where calls for police jumped after some 50 Katrina evacuee families settled there, tell tales of conflicts involving young Louisiana men that went on for months, even after management, who did not respond to interview requests, arranged extra security.
One police report tells of 10 men chasing off the drivers of a meat delivery truck, then looting the vehicle in a frenzy until it was empty.
Josh Hooper, a young man from New Orleans, boasted of participating in conflicts.
"It got crazy around here. It was shooting and shooting, for real," he said, getting into a car with friends. "We did shoot back. I'm gonna tell you for real. You think somebody shootin' at me and I ain't gonna shoot back? For real. This is Texas; everybody got a gun."
Several evacuees said the complex has settled down noticeably since most of their compatriots moved, a story echoed elsewhere.
Evacuees living in West and North San Antonio complained bitterly about similar problems they say are caused by fellow evacuees, sometimes young men fighting over drugs with young San Antonio men.
"The thugs and criminals here (in San Antonio) met up and socialized with the thugs and criminals from there (New Orleans)," said Stephaney Wyeth, a 58-year-old grandmother from New Orleans, describing the nightly drug dealing, shootings and fights she endured in her Northwest San Antonio complex.
Buyers looking for drugs mistakenly knock on her door all night long, she said.
"It seems like our complex is the whole city's place to come and get drugs," Wyeth said, wishing her fellow evacuees would leave. "We have a lot of criminals in the building."
Yolanda Herbert, 43, blames local San Antonio youths for instigating violence with the New Orleans crowd.
"I think they're just getting with the wrong people," she said. "I believe they're being influenced by other gangsters that's from here who know where to go and what to do."
Others said they were targets of locals interested in stealing financial aid that everyone on the street knew the evacuees received. Evacuee Lavell Simpson said groups of Hispanic youths preyed on the evacuees at his complex near Lackland AFB.
He said a group of three young Hispanics once attacked him "to take me for my jewelry."
"They can tell who we are," Simpson said, sitting on the stairwell leading up to his apartment one afternoon. "We dress different. We talk different. We walk different."
In late July, a Katrina evacuee was shot in the leg during a robbery at his apartment in 3100 block of East Commerce. He had cashed a FEMA check. The robbers got away.
Several hot spots exist
The Express-News tried to discern whether data supported perceptions among evacuees and residents both in and around 10 of the more than 170 apartment complexes where evacuees resettled last fall. The complexes were selected because they hosted high concentrations of evacuees.
Three measurements — police offense reports, residents' calls for police and total crime offense reports in a half-mile surrounding radius — showed rises in and around four of the 10 complexes compared with the same time period a year before. Five others showed declines in one or two of those measurements but increases in others. One of the 10 complexes showed declines in all three.
Residents who live in other complexes that took in large numbers of evacuees said what cold hard numbers can't. They've been feeling more afraid — of evacuees.
Evacuee Trina Boone of New Orleans, a mother of two young children who lives at Artisan at Willow Springs on Gembler Road, showed a bullet hole that was fired through her apartment one morning in June.
"To be honest, they selling a lot of weed," she said. "We have a lot of fightin' and shootin', all kinds of whatnot; that's why I'm moving out of here."
Another hot spot centers on an urban strip of W.W. White Road on San Antonio's East Side, where businesses from major chains to small eateries sustained a spike in armed robberies that frightened owners into organizing to defend themselves.
Crime data support their claims, but in other parts of the city, residents made claims against evacuees that data did not appear to support.
For instance, Nette Hinton, a retired U.S. Customs officer and member of Dignowity Hill Homeowners Association east of downtown, blamed evacuees who she believed traveled from other parts of the city to commit crimes along a stretch of Hackberry Street that police had worked years to reduce.
An analysis of crime data showed crime and calls for police service on and around Hackberry Street actually fell after evacuees came to San Antonio.
Still, Hinton believes political timidity has caused city officials to turn a blind eye to concerns like hers.
The former agent said leaders "probably hesitate to point fingers at the bad elements because it's antithetical to the kindly face we presented to Katrina evacuees. I think we're embarrassed to say there were some thugs and they're still here preying on people."
Not to wonder why
In Houston, which also received five times as many evacuees as San Antonio, the statistical impact is not much greater because its population is three times the Alamo City's size.
After tracing murders and noting leaps in other violent crime near resettlement areas, the administration of Houston Mayor Bill White has aggressively pursued more than $30 million in federal money for public safety costs. The money has gone to pay police and fire overtime and for five new police academy training classes.
In San Antonio, police overtime costs have gone up and remained higher since the evacuees came. No evidence has surfaced that these increased costs are linked to serving San Antonio's evacuees. City officials blame various nonpreventable operations for higher overtime costs but do allow for the possibility of evacuee-related services as a cause.
Houston has claimed the evacuee link wholeheartedly, with some success. Houston won an $18 million Department of Justice grant after White lobbied Houston's congressional delegation.
"My opinion is it never hurts to ask," said Gary E. Gray, assistant director for Houston's finance department. "If you don't ask what's possible, nothing's going to happen."
A number of San Antonio city leaders, including top police commanders, professed ignorance of Houston's problem with "Katrina crime" and its pursuit of federal funds and said they saw no need to follow suit. Yet money is tight.
San Antonio's leaders, voting last month on a new budget, had to scrimp and scrape $2.4 million in city tax money out of next year's budget to help fund a 54-officer addition to its 2,069-member force that McManus said was hundreds short of what is needed.
In San Antonio, police overtime costs were falling steadily for the eight months before evacuees arrived, then from September 2005 through December rose to a record $6.7 million, of which $4 million was evacuee-related and reimbursed by FEMA, according to figures supplied by the city's finance department.
Houston has fought to recover more of the costs than it was reimbursed during that four-month period, as well as extra costs through May.
San Antonio's police overtime costs were up 11 percent from January through May, amounting to $400,000 more over the same period a year earlier.
Houston has also sought federal money for fire department overtime since the initial influx of evacuees.
Last October, before the shelters were closed, San Antonio top officials repeatedly assured the media that little anticipated crime had surfaced.
However, data from September 2005 to December show the number of crime reports generated from a half-mile area around the KellyUSA shelter spiked more than 160 percent, from 27 to 71, as a result of robberies, burglaries and drugs.
One office that did try to track crime related to evacuees is the Bexar County district attorney's office, which identified at least 135 prosecutions of evacuees staying in shelters last fall. Offenses ranged from rape to petty larceny and theft. One evacuee was charged with murder.
The DA's office initiated the count, First Assistant District Attorney Cliff Herberg said, should it need to justify federal funding requests later, but let the program lapse after the shelters emptied. A Police Department effort to code evacuee arrests also ended after a short time for reasons that remain unclear.
"I certainly think the impact has been much more, much more" than the 135 criminal prosecutions, Herberg said. "I think we're all aware of that. There's been a criminal element over there that has become a criminal element here."
Yet most other public officials posit various other causes for more crime while excluding evacuees. Councilwoman Sheila McNeil, whose district is bedeviled by a spiking number of armed robberies, dismissed the evacuees as a possible contributor.
"Part of it happens during the Christmas holidays," McNeil said of the robberies. "No one speculated what it could be, just Christmas time and people needed extra money. I've talked to our police officers and they have not given me that indication (of an evacuee link)."
In August, as the council was considering the slim police-hiring budget, Hardberger also excluded evacuees and blamed higher crime on an annual summer cycle. When asked if he'd ever considered that evacuees he embraced a year earlier brought crime to his city, the mayor said: "I don't believe the statistics will support that in San Antonio."
He said he was not interested in learning if it was true so the city might benefit from federal money.
"I know the statistics are up," Hardberger said. "But I'm not seeking a scapegoat here."
Several hours after that interview, however, the mayor phoned to say he'd had a change of heart and had asked City Manager Sheryl Sculley to examine the question.
"We need to look at the facts, and if we're going to look at the facts you'd better gather the facts first, and that's what I'm going to be doing," Hardberger said.
Two weeks later, the mayor's initiative produced a single-page interoffice memo from James Glass, manager of the SAPD Strategic Analysis and Mapping Office, to McManus.
The Aug. 16 memo titled "Analysis of Crime & Katrina Evacuees," cited an evacuee population number between five and six times lower than the nearly 30,000 that FEMA and Red Cross officials provided to the Express-News.
It went on to state in part, "the results from this micro level analysis are inconclusive" and that more study of updated information would be necessary. Police spokesman Gabe Trevino dismissed the short study, saying "That doesn't tell you anything. We can't say one way or another."
But when questioned about a possible Katrina link to higher crime and federal money, McManus cited the memo as grounds for why he was not inclined to order a more rigorous examination.
"We can't pinpoint any increases in crime to any particular population," he said.
The disinclination to learn more has carried over into enforcement strategy. Apartment complexes with large numbers of evacuees never figured into a special police task force that McManus deployed for 60 days this summer to target high crime areas, even though SAPD Capt. Cris Anderson, its commander, said he believed an evacuee-crime link existed.
Since Katrina evacuees arrived, Anderson said one night as his task force went into action where no evacuees lived, "there are more hot spots and violent pockets in town, and I just don't believe it's coincidental."
In contrast, a similar counter-crime task force fielded by Houston focused on evacuee complexes.
Gilbert, the UTSA criminologist, said all the debate about Katrina crime in Houston and perceptions about it in San Antonio should be viewed through a wider lens of time.
Compared with high violent crime in the late 1980s, San Antonio is enjoying historically low crime overall, even with its new population, in defiance of what studies like those he has authored show: Crime is usually higher in poor communities.
"San Antonio is a very poor city," he said. "And yet we have a very safe city, comparatively."
---------------
Part 2
---------------
Complex with Katrina evacuees became a criminal haven
Web Posted: 10/30/2006 01:34 AM CST
Todd Bensman
Express-News Staff
Second of two parts.
Maybe it was the armed and uniformed peace officers induced by rent breaks who moved in. Or maybe it's just because enough of the troublemakers have moved out.
Whatever the cause, a fragile sense of peace has replaced chaos and fear since management started kicking out dozens of mostly young and male Katrina evacuees over the summer at the 248-unit Artisan at Willow Springs Apartments.
"It was hell," said New Orleans evacuee Lashawn Mason, a young mother who lives at Willow Springs. "They had the police running up in here pulling guns. It was all this drama all the time."
While the relative calm is welcome, it's still interrupted. Mason said the other day someone pulled out an AK-47 and began firing in the air.
The complex's first year in the 500 block of Gembler Road has been rough, starting the day in September 2005 when it opened its new gates to its first residents — evacuees. Over time it gained a reputation on the streets of East San Antonio as a criminal hot spot.
Since the city declined to track whether increases in crime were related to 30,000 displaced New Orleans residents who came to San Antonio, there are no firm numbers to show whether or how much crime went up because of the influx.
But if skeptics question the existence of "Katrina crime" around other San Antonio apartment complexes where evacuees resettled, police statistics and internal records reinforce the perception that it reigned at Willow Springs.
The Express-News obtained an internal apartment management company memo, titled "Safety Issues and Sequence of Events," from which can be discerned how a lack of police involvement left management, ever generous to its new inhabitants, to fend for itself as dangerous crime defied control.
The beginning
Very soon after the evacuees started moving in that September, the gleaming new brick complex, with its pools and grassy courtyards, became notorious among police and area residents for lawlessness inside — and sometimes outside — its gates.
Evacuee drug dealers set up shop inside common breezeways. According to evacuees, nonresident strangers came to the complex almost nightly for door-stoop parties, drunken fights, thievery and, too often, gunplay.
Police records back their statements.
From September 2005 through July, the complex logged nearly 440 calls for police, an average of 40 a month. Crime nearly doubled in one small, older neighborhood nearby, police offense reports show.
Alma Guillen, the complex's manager, said she has worked in government-subsidized affordable-housing projects like Willow Springs for all of her six years in the business.
"By far, this is the most challenging group I've ever experienced," she said.
Guillen's bosses at the nonprofit Merced Housing of Texas, which co-owns the property with Franklin Development, did not return repeated calls requesting interviews.
But management officials didn't stand by idly. The Merced memo chronicling the evacuees' stay at the complex provides a rare glimpse inside and doesn't sound far different, based on interviews with evacuees, from what happened at other complexes the Express-News visited.
The first problems "involving drugs and destructive behavior" at Willow Springs surfaced within a week of completing the resettlement of some 40 Katrina evacuee families in October 2005. More would come and be joined by nonevacuee tenants.
Managers responded by hiring Willow Springs' first "courtesy officer," Bexar County district attorney's office investigator Joseph Piette.
The hire didn't seem to help. By month's end, residents were complaining at a meeting with Merced staff about "disruptive residents and unsupervised children," as well as trash dumping.
But those problems would very soon be the least of management's worries. Piette, who did not respond to an interview request, would move out and leave a few months later, citing fear for the safety of his own family.
Merced responded to residents' complaints with a stern measure of equanimity that would largely endure through the next difficult months. The company brought in parenting programs and organized children's activities, set up a 10 p.m. curfew and hosted job-training programs.
In return, the company encountered more problems, especially involving children, as Thanksgiving approached. Management had to evict several families for "disruptive behavior or involvement with drugs," including a case where the live-in boyfriend of a leaseholder was selling drugs.
On Nov. 20, management sent letters to residents beseeching them to exercise "parental responsibilities" and warned that Child Protective Services would be called to investigate "serious incidents involving children."
Still, management doled out the sweet with the sour. It made sure that Thanksgiving and Christmas were festive events, holding holiday parties and dinners for Katrina evacuees at a nearby mansion, inviting sports figures to attend and handing out gifts.
The New Year brought escalating problems. Guns began appearing where children played. The memo also pointed to a problem discerned elsewhere in San Antonio: criminal behavior that occurred when San Antonio locals mixed with Louisiana evacuees.
Case in point: A disagreement between small children escalated to older kids and then involved parents in a full-scale brawl.
"The dispute pitted New Orleans residents against San Antonio residents," the memo reported. "Some residents were beat up and one resident brought out a shotgun."
Since no one was arrested, police reports don't reflect this incident, suggesting criminal behavior was worse than the data show. In another incident that produced no arrest, the memo stated, "Someone fired a gun across the courtyard but no one was injured. The shooter was never identified."
No background checks
Before January was over, the complex's courtesy officer was calling for backup, citing a need for increased patrolling. Management staff sought help from the nonprofit anti-drug group San Antonio Fighting Back and called residents to mandatory meetings "to discuss security and safety."
Two Bexar County sheriff's deputies were hired off-duty to patrol for two weeks.
"Drug busts were made by the deputies," the memo stated.
But they had to be let go when the money ran out.
In February, management tried another approach to weed out the criminal element. Staff contacted the Bexar County district attorney's office "to determine whether any information was available on New Orleans residents who had criminal histories" so they could be "re-screened."
The evacuees had moved in so fast that management didn't have the time or wherewithal to conduct standard criminal background checks, and Louisiana at the time was refusing to release criminal history information to Texas authorities. The DA's office was able only to provide a list of serious sex offenders who were being apprehended.
It's unclear whether Merced was ever able to identify Louisianans with criminal histories that would disqualify them as tenants — a problem mirrored by police agencies and other apartment complexes' managers across the state.
The police response
On Feb. 8, management staff requested a meeting with several police officers assigned to the area "to discuss slow police response time."
An unidentified substation commander explained that "all police calls will not receive a response" and turned down management's request to establish some kind of regular police presence on site that would bring uniformed officers around and deter crime.
SAPD did offer a "Cellular on Patrol class" as a first step to establish a neighborhood watch program, but "attendance was low," the memo stated.
Meanwhile, problems continued both on and off Willow Springs property. In two incidents, residents crashed their vehicles into the complex's iron perimeter fence gates; one person reportedly was high on drugs.
And the gunplay around children continued.
"During Spring Break week, someone fired a gun across the courtyard during daylight while children were playing at the playground," the memo stated. "The rumor is that there was a dispute over drugs. No one was injured but many residents were frightened."
Management vowed to keep trying to develop a relationship with San Antonio police while looking for enough money to pay for private security.
Reached last week, the commander of the Police Department's eastern sector, Capt. Gary Smith, said he didn't consider the level of crime at Willow Springs any worse than many other area apartment complexes.
He acknowledged "we did have some problems with the whole service area" over the past year.
And although the captain didn't assign blame for any of the additional crime to evacuees, he conceded that others, including the apartment management, did.
Smith said crime in Willow Springs was actually reported frequently enough over the summer that Councilwoman Sheila McNeil personally intervened, requesting that a special police "Crime Response Team" task force be deployed to the complex. The request was denied.
Smith said he thinks police responded adequately to crime complaints at Willow Springs.
"I believe we assisted them as we would anyone else," he said.
But not everyone in law enforcement shared the official view of life at Willow Springs.
In March, district attorney's office investigator Piette quit working as a courtesy officer and moved out for safety reasons.
Piette left behind his assessment of the situation. Among the issues he cited was a rivalry between Katrina evacuees and San Antonio residents and disruption in the established San Antonio drug trade "by the new Katrina folks."
He also offered another assessment that had nothing to do with the drug trade: a lack of respect among evacuees. Two days after Piette quit, one Willow Spring resident held up another resident at gunpoint to rob him of a beer, the memo stated.
Meanwhile, disciplinary problems involving the children of evacuees had spread to the nearby Cameron Academy. At a meeting March 29 between school and apartment management officials, an assistant principal told management staff "that there are Katrina kids causing problems on campus."
Principal Carolyn McClure did not return a phone call seeking comment.
Still striving, management staff got creative, at one point seeking the advice of a "conflict resolution" consultant. Management continued to offer the evacuees what extras it could, including attendance for evacuee families at a San Antonio Spurs Easter event.
Two days later, on April 17, there was another shooting at the complex.
The troubles continued on through the summer, including a June incident that made all the newscasts.
Some armed youths got caught trying to steal the unmarked car of a deputy sheriff who had come to serve an arrest warrant. Shots were fired, and the youths holed up in the apartment manager's office until police SWAT team members extracted them.
A wall for security
In recent months, management staff also has been meeting with surrounding neighborhood associations to find ways to improve security. A spokeswoman for the Skyline Park Neighborhood Association said a key objective of the recent initiative was to get more police patrolling the area.
"My biggest thought is to let the Police Department handle the Police Department's work," said Kathy Harris, association president.
One neighbor mounted its own initiative — an RV park built a $100,000 wall to help instill a sense of security for tourist customers, two managers said.
"We never thought of putting a fence up before we started having all the problems across the street," assistant park manager Judy Swalley said. "I hate to say that, and I don't like judging people, but that would be the main reason why we're putting it up."
A corporate public relations official called several weeks later to say the wall had been planned all along and was not prompted by troubles at the neighboring complex.
By mid-July, when the Express-News began visiting Willow Springs for this report, several uniformed sheriff's deputies were living in the complex and helping to enforce a zero-tolerance policy that had 15-year-old evacuee Anthony Smith chafing.
"I'm getting tired of this, dog," he said. "I'm sick of it. They act like we damned criminals. We got a lease. We citizens."
As recently as last week, complex manager Guillen was declaring that victory was the result of not renewing evacuees' leases, en masse.
"It's so clean, so quiet," she said. "Everybody who wanted to move out wants to stay now."
---------------
----------------
Katrina crime: Perceived or real?
Web Posted: 10/29/2006 12:49 AM CDT
Todd Bensman
Express-News Staff
Just days after the first of about 30,000 Louisiana hurricane evacuees began arriving in San Antonio, Mayor Phil Hardberger was asked a simple question he laughingly brushed off. What might be the impact of the influx on city crime rates and services?
It was Sept. 7, 2005, and the mayor was riding high on national praise for a CNN appearance during which he had projected an image of his city as unflinchingly philanthropic. People displaced by Katrina still were flooding in.
"That's like if my house is on fire and I'm looking to you for a bucket of water, and you ask what the new house will look like," he said with a laugh. "Everybody's been worried about crime, and the impact on social services. But so far, it is just worry; it hasn't been factual."
More than a year later, the issue remains unaddressed, conspicuously so in light of a 55 percent spike in murders the first eight months of this year, increasing violent crime rates in San Antonio, a stretched police force and widespread media reports linking some evacuees in Houston to similar crime trends there.
So: Did the sudden arrival of about 30,000 evacuees, a group equal to Del Rio in population, cause additional crime? The question, loaded with the kind of politically sensitive racial implications that can discomfit some politicians, is much more than academic. Millions of dollars could be at stake.
In choosing not to ask, San Antonio's political leadership potentially turned its back on federal money that Houston has gained by citing an evacuee link to a increasing murder rate and other violent crime.
It also invites speculation and perceptions not necessarily grounded in fact.
City leaders, such as Hardberger, several council members and top police officials, assert the evacuees have had no effect on crime. Those who interact most closely with some of the city's highest concentrations of evacuees, including beat cops, business owners and the evacuees themselves, say the opposite is true.
The San Antonio Express-News spent four months trying to determine whether a link exists between evacuees and crime in San Antonio. Among the highlights were an extensive analysis of crime data and interviews with dozens of street-level officers, community leaders, business owners, residents and evacuees throughout the city:
Steeply declining rates of violent crime and property crime during the first eight months of 2005 suddenly reversed after they arrived, although there is no proof evacuees caused it. Houston, however, has successfully cited a similar coincidence of suddenly rising crime to argue for more federal money.
Crime hot spots developed after evacuees arrived in and around some of the 170 apartment complexes where they resettled. For example, one 10-mile stretch of W.W. White Road contributed 20 percent of a citywide spike in armed robberies last fall. In contrast, at least one complex had lower crime after relatively large numbers of evacuees moved in, based on several measures of crime.
Of the 55 percent spike in San Antonio's murders this year, three suspects and two victims were found to be evacuees. Several other cases have suspected links, but dozens of cases could neither be included nor excluded as related to evacuees. Unlike Houston, the San Antonio Police Department homicide unit never has been asked to methodically look for such a connection that could be cited in a request for federal funds.
Violence and criminal activity involving evacuees occurred as the result of interaction between San Antonio residents and the new arrivals, often over drugs.
A coincidence of crime
The Louisiana evacuees found much more than a welcoming refuge when they showed up in need at San Antonio's doorstep last summer. Compared with their crime-ridden neighborhoods back home, evacuees found relative peace and security here. Most came from the same few districts responsible for making New Orleans notorious as the nation's most lethally violent city.
But San Antonio had been enjoying eight months of double-digit downturns in serious crime, such as murder, robbery and rape and sexual assaults, when the newcomers began settling into local shelters and hotels on Sept. 2, 2005.
Then the trend, for reasons unknown, reversed significantly in certain categories of crime. By Christmas 2005, San Antonio was beset by double-digit rises in the kind of crime that residents in any city especially fear and loathe.
Compared with the September-to-December period a year earlier, armed robberies of businesses were up 42 percent, and of people up 18 percent. Vehicle theft was up 18 percent, and weapons violations 33 percent, to name a few.
The number of residents' calls for police ballooned and is now on track to set a record by breaking the 1 million mark this year, with an average 8,500 more calls for police per month from September 2005 through July 30 than the same period a year earlier. The swell began just after evacuees arrived, taxing street cops and stretching response times.
The Houston metropolitan area, which received five times as many evacuees but is three times the size of the San Antonio area, experienced a similar coincidence of higher crime after evacuees arrived on a comparative scale.
Neither Houston nor the Express-News was able to examine the only unassailable evidence that would link imported criminal elements to higher crime: last known addresses for either suspects or victims. Many crimes remain unsolved with no suspects to identify.
The absence of suspect arrests and publicly available information that would prove an evacuee link to specific crimes has left some crime victims to draw their own conclusions.
Ed Theo Flores, owner of the family-run Theo's Brake and Tire Service near downtown for 40 years, had experienced only one crime in the business' history, and that was two decades ago. In a few weeks after more than 50 evacuee families moved into the hotel next door to his shop, Flores reported three cars stolen off his lot and a break-in that cost him hundreds of dollars in tools. No arrests were made.
"I'm not blaming anything on the Katrina people," Flores said, choosing his words carefully. "I'm just saying the coincidence is right there."
The hotel did have problems with the evacuees. It was forced to evict a third of the guests for drugs and prostitution, said Janice Maragakis, spokeswoman for hotel owner Accor North America. Police reports confirm an increase in arrests at the address.
More than half of the city's evacuee population now is gone, having begun trickling out of town when Federal Emergency Management Agency housing vouchers started running out last spring, officials report. The overall total crime rate citywide has tapered off.
Today, top police officials are quick to highlight that total crime doesn't look bad.
From September 2005 through July, total crime citywide was up only 2.3 percent and total violent crime came out about even.
"The big picture is that violent crime is down," Police Chief William McManus said.
But total citywide numbers touted by police officials don't tell what happened for many months in neighborhoods after evacuees settled in them.
The period from September 2005 through July shows that several crime categories remained in double-digit higher territory over the same period a year earlier. Those include drug crimes, up 14 percent; total aggravated robberies, up 27 percent; and vehicle theft, up 17 percent.
Open to debate
Houston's attempt to peg a statistical correlation of higher crime rates to the arrival of evacuees has brought in millions of dollars to help pay its police and fire bills. But that city's correlation — and the Express-News' attempt to replicate Houston's analysis — is open to debate.
Criminologist Dr. Peter Scharf, director of the University of New Orleans Center for Society, Law and Justice, said the newspaper's findings, as well as Houston's, of the apparent shifts in the crime trends are "highly probative," suggesting some degree of proof.
"I think you're on to something," Scharf said after examining the Express-News findings. "And the lack of curiosity in your town is really interesting."
Scharf is studying the migration of people from the nation's most criminally prolific districts in New Orleans to Texas and back. He said it helps no one to casually dismiss what to him is an obvious pattern in which violent crime has followed one of the most dangerous criminal underclasses in the country.
It is likely no coincidence, Scharf also said, that crime rates in New Orleans fell from the nation's highest to nearly zero when just those few flooded high-crime districts emptied into Texas. Now, New Orleans crime is approaching old highs — in new areas — as evacuees settle in them, Scharf said.
Still, he cautioned that correlating a short-term crime spike with the arrival of evacuees is at best a crude barometer justifying more study and cannot be used to rule out other possible causes of a crime trend.
Other criminologists go further.
"I think saying that comes pretty close to demonizing people who were evacuated. All you can say is that's interesting, that went up," said Dr. Michael J. Gilbert, associate professor in the University of Texas at San Antonio criminal justice department and Mayor Phil Hardberger's appointee to a local crime commission.
"While that's perfectly rational thinking, it may be misleading in terms of what this data may actually mean. I think they're (city of Houston) trying to make the best case they can to get money when it's not defensible."
He and other experts say the coincidence that a sudden spike in major crime occurred with the arrival of evacuees might easily be explained by population increases, shifts in police tactics or changing drug trade dynamics.
Albert Steven Dietz, a criminal justice professor at Texas State University in San Marcos, said the post-September crime rate jumps in San Antonio indicate to him that some evacuees may have contributed out of proportion to their numbers — but for just the first few months of their residency.
He said a logical assumption is that the simple crime trend becomes less indicative after evacuees disburse throughout the city and, for instance, find opportunities to leave the criminal underworld, if they were part of it.
Is perception reality?
While nearly impossible to easily verify the origins of all arrestees through available public records, a perception accompanies the pattern of increasing crime: Based in truth or not, some people who interact closely with evacuees believe elements of that imported population are committing the crimes. Among them are police, prosecutors, apartment complex managers, neighboring residents and business owners.
Perhaps most credibly, though, evacuees themselves in a dozen apartment complexes told the Express-News they believe some in their own ranks are responsible for violence, thievery and drug dealing that have made their own law-abiding lives in San Antonio as miserable as they were in New Orleans.
Among those who came to San Antonio were at least 140 probationers and parolees from Louisiana who hadn't reported to a parole or probation officer in either Texas or their home state, the Express-News reported in July.
Evacuees in the Huntley Manor apartments in East San Antonio, where calls for police jumped after some 50 Katrina evacuee families settled there, tell tales of conflicts involving young Louisiana men that went on for months, even after management, who did not respond to interview requests, arranged extra security.
One police report tells of 10 men chasing off the drivers of a meat delivery truck, then looting the vehicle in a frenzy until it was empty.
Josh Hooper, a young man from New Orleans, boasted of participating in conflicts.
"It got crazy around here. It was shooting and shooting, for real," he said, getting into a car with friends. "We did shoot back. I'm gonna tell you for real. You think somebody shootin' at me and I ain't gonna shoot back? For real. This is Texas; everybody got a gun."
Several evacuees said the complex has settled down noticeably since most of their compatriots moved, a story echoed elsewhere.
Evacuees living in West and North San Antonio complained bitterly about similar problems they say are caused by fellow evacuees, sometimes young men fighting over drugs with young San Antonio men.
"The thugs and criminals here (in San Antonio) met up and socialized with the thugs and criminals from there (New Orleans)," said Stephaney Wyeth, a 58-year-old grandmother from New Orleans, describing the nightly drug dealing, shootings and fights she endured in her Northwest San Antonio complex.
Buyers looking for drugs mistakenly knock on her door all night long, she said.
"It seems like our complex is the whole city's place to come and get drugs," Wyeth said, wishing her fellow evacuees would leave. "We have a lot of criminals in the building."
Yolanda Herbert, 43, blames local San Antonio youths for instigating violence with the New Orleans crowd.
"I think they're just getting with the wrong people," she said. "I believe they're being influenced by other gangsters that's from here who know where to go and what to do."
Others said they were targets of locals interested in stealing financial aid that everyone on the street knew the evacuees received. Evacuee Lavell Simpson said groups of Hispanic youths preyed on the evacuees at his complex near Lackland AFB.
He said a group of three young Hispanics once attacked him "to take me for my jewelry."
"They can tell who we are," Simpson said, sitting on the stairwell leading up to his apartment one afternoon. "We dress different. We talk different. We walk different."
In late July, a Katrina evacuee was shot in the leg during a robbery at his apartment in 3100 block of East Commerce. He had cashed a FEMA check. The robbers got away.
Several hot spots exist
The Express-News tried to discern whether data supported perceptions among evacuees and residents both in and around 10 of the more than 170 apartment complexes where evacuees resettled last fall. The complexes were selected because they hosted high concentrations of evacuees.
Three measurements — police offense reports, residents' calls for police and total crime offense reports in a half-mile surrounding radius — showed rises in and around four of the 10 complexes compared with the same time period a year before. Five others showed declines in one or two of those measurements but increases in others. One of the 10 complexes showed declines in all three.
Residents who live in other complexes that took in large numbers of evacuees said what cold hard numbers can't. They've been feeling more afraid — of evacuees.
Evacuee Trina Boone of New Orleans, a mother of two young children who lives at Artisan at Willow Springs on Gembler Road, showed a bullet hole that was fired through her apartment one morning in June.
"To be honest, they selling a lot of weed," she said. "We have a lot of fightin' and shootin', all kinds of whatnot; that's why I'm moving out of here."
Another hot spot centers on an urban strip of W.W. White Road on San Antonio's East Side, where businesses from major chains to small eateries sustained a spike in armed robberies that frightened owners into organizing to defend themselves.
Crime data support their claims, but in other parts of the city, residents made claims against evacuees that data did not appear to support.
For instance, Nette Hinton, a retired U.S. Customs officer and member of Dignowity Hill Homeowners Association east of downtown, blamed evacuees who she believed traveled from other parts of the city to commit crimes along a stretch of Hackberry Street that police had worked years to reduce.
An analysis of crime data showed crime and calls for police service on and around Hackberry Street actually fell after evacuees came to San Antonio.
Still, Hinton believes political timidity has caused city officials to turn a blind eye to concerns like hers.
The former agent said leaders "probably hesitate to point fingers at the bad elements because it's antithetical to the kindly face we presented to Katrina evacuees. I think we're embarrassed to say there were some thugs and they're still here preying on people."
Not to wonder why
In Houston, which also received five times as many evacuees as San Antonio, the statistical impact is not much greater because its population is three times the Alamo City's size.
After tracing murders and noting leaps in other violent crime near resettlement areas, the administration of Houston Mayor Bill White has aggressively pursued more than $30 million in federal money for public safety costs. The money has gone to pay police and fire overtime and for five new police academy training classes.
In San Antonio, police overtime costs have gone up and remained higher since the evacuees came. No evidence has surfaced that these increased costs are linked to serving San Antonio's evacuees. City officials blame various nonpreventable operations for higher overtime costs but do allow for the possibility of evacuee-related services as a cause.
Houston has claimed the evacuee link wholeheartedly, with some success. Houston won an $18 million Department of Justice grant after White lobbied Houston's congressional delegation.
"My opinion is it never hurts to ask," said Gary E. Gray, assistant director for Houston's finance department. "If you don't ask what's possible, nothing's going to happen."
A number of San Antonio city leaders, including top police commanders, professed ignorance of Houston's problem with "Katrina crime" and its pursuit of federal funds and said they saw no need to follow suit. Yet money is tight.
San Antonio's leaders, voting last month on a new budget, had to scrimp and scrape $2.4 million in city tax money out of next year's budget to help fund a 54-officer addition to its 2,069-member force that McManus said was hundreds short of what is needed.
In San Antonio, police overtime costs were falling steadily for the eight months before evacuees arrived, then from September 2005 through December rose to a record $6.7 million, of which $4 million was evacuee-related and reimbursed by FEMA, according to figures supplied by the city's finance department.
Houston has fought to recover more of the costs than it was reimbursed during that four-month period, as well as extra costs through May.
San Antonio's police overtime costs were up 11 percent from January through May, amounting to $400,000 more over the same period a year earlier.
Houston has also sought federal money for fire department overtime since the initial influx of evacuees.
Last October, before the shelters were closed, San Antonio top officials repeatedly assured the media that little anticipated crime had surfaced.
However, data from September 2005 to December show the number of crime reports generated from a half-mile area around the KellyUSA shelter spiked more than 160 percent, from 27 to 71, as a result of robberies, burglaries and drugs.
One office that did try to track crime related to evacuees is the Bexar County district attorney's office, which identified at least 135 prosecutions of evacuees staying in shelters last fall. Offenses ranged from rape to petty larceny and theft. One evacuee was charged with murder.
The DA's office initiated the count, First Assistant District Attorney Cliff Herberg said, should it need to justify federal funding requests later, but let the program lapse after the shelters emptied. A Police Department effort to code evacuee arrests also ended after a short time for reasons that remain unclear.
"I certainly think the impact has been much more, much more" than the 135 criminal prosecutions, Herberg said. "I think we're all aware of that. There's been a criminal element over there that has become a criminal element here."
Yet most other public officials posit various other causes for more crime while excluding evacuees. Councilwoman Sheila McNeil, whose district is bedeviled by a spiking number of armed robberies, dismissed the evacuees as a possible contributor.
"Part of it happens during the Christmas holidays," McNeil said of the robberies. "No one speculated what it could be, just Christmas time and people needed extra money. I've talked to our police officers and they have not given me that indication (of an evacuee link)."
In August, as the council was considering the slim police-hiring budget, Hardberger also excluded evacuees and blamed higher crime on an annual summer cycle. When asked if he'd ever considered that evacuees he embraced a year earlier brought crime to his city, the mayor said: "I don't believe the statistics will support that in San Antonio."
He said he was not interested in learning if it was true so the city might benefit from federal money.
"I know the statistics are up," Hardberger said. "But I'm not seeking a scapegoat here."
Several hours after that interview, however, the mayor phoned to say he'd had a change of heart and had asked City Manager Sheryl Sculley to examine the question.
"We need to look at the facts, and if we're going to look at the facts you'd better gather the facts first, and that's what I'm going to be doing," Hardberger said.
Two weeks later, the mayor's initiative produced a single-page interoffice memo from James Glass, manager of the SAPD Strategic Analysis and Mapping Office, to McManus.
The Aug. 16 memo titled "Analysis of Crime & Katrina Evacuees," cited an evacuee population number between five and six times lower than the nearly 30,000 that FEMA and Red Cross officials provided to the Express-News.
It went on to state in part, "the results from this micro level analysis are inconclusive" and that more study of updated information would be necessary. Police spokesman Gabe Trevino dismissed the short study, saying "That doesn't tell you anything. We can't say one way or another."
But when questioned about a possible Katrina link to higher crime and federal money, McManus cited the memo as grounds for why he was not inclined to order a more rigorous examination.
"We can't pinpoint any increases in crime to any particular population," he said.
The disinclination to learn more has carried over into enforcement strategy. Apartment complexes with large numbers of evacuees never figured into a special police task force that McManus deployed for 60 days this summer to target high crime areas, even though SAPD Capt. Cris Anderson, its commander, said he believed an evacuee-crime link existed.
Since Katrina evacuees arrived, Anderson said one night as his task force went into action where no evacuees lived, "there are more hot spots and violent pockets in town, and I just don't believe it's coincidental."
In contrast, a similar counter-crime task force fielded by Houston focused on evacuee complexes.
Gilbert, the UTSA criminologist, said all the debate about Katrina crime in Houston and perceptions about it in San Antonio should be viewed through a wider lens of time.
Compared with high violent crime in the late 1980s, San Antonio is enjoying historically low crime overall, even with its new population, in defiance of what studies like those he has authored show: Crime is usually higher in poor communities.
"San Antonio is a very poor city," he said. "And yet we have a very safe city, comparatively."
---------------
Part 2
---------------
Complex with Katrina evacuees became a criminal haven
Web Posted: 10/30/2006 01:34 AM CST
Todd Bensman
Express-News Staff
Second of two parts.
Maybe it was the armed and uniformed peace officers induced by rent breaks who moved in. Or maybe it's just because enough of the troublemakers have moved out.
Whatever the cause, a fragile sense of peace has replaced chaos and fear since management started kicking out dozens of mostly young and male Katrina evacuees over the summer at the 248-unit Artisan at Willow Springs Apartments.
"It was hell," said New Orleans evacuee Lashawn Mason, a young mother who lives at Willow Springs. "They had the police running up in here pulling guns. It was all this drama all the time."
While the relative calm is welcome, it's still interrupted. Mason said the other day someone pulled out an AK-47 and began firing in the air.
The complex's first year in the 500 block of Gembler Road has been rough, starting the day in September 2005 when it opened its new gates to its first residents — evacuees. Over time it gained a reputation on the streets of East San Antonio as a criminal hot spot.
Since the city declined to track whether increases in crime were related to 30,000 displaced New Orleans residents who came to San Antonio, there are no firm numbers to show whether or how much crime went up because of the influx.
But if skeptics question the existence of "Katrina crime" around other San Antonio apartment complexes where evacuees resettled, police statistics and internal records reinforce the perception that it reigned at Willow Springs.
The Express-News obtained an internal apartment management company memo, titled "Safety Issues and Sequence of Events," from which can be discerned how a lack of police involvement left management, ever generous to its new inhabitants, to fend for itself as dangerous crime defied control.
The beginning
Very soon after the evacuees started moving in that September, the gleaming new brick complex, with its pools and grassy courtyards, became notorious among police and area residents for lawlessness inside — and sometimes outside — its gates.
Evacuee drug dealers set up shop inside common breezeways. According to evacuees, nonresident strangers came to the complex almost nightly for door-stoop parties, drunken fights, thievery and, too often, gunplay.
Police records back their statements.
From September 2005 through July, the complex logged nearly 440 calls for police, an average of 40 a month. Crime nearly doubled in one small, older neighborhood nearby, police offense reports show.
Alma Guillen, the complex's manager, said she has worked in government-subsidized affordable-housing projects like Willow Springs for all of her six years in the business.
"By far, this is the most challenging group I've ever experienced," she said.
Guillen's bosses at the nonprofit Merced Housing of Texas, which co-owns the property with Franklin Development, did not return repeated calls requesting interviews.
But management officials didn't stand by idly. The Merced memo chronicling the evacuees' stay at the complex provides a rare glimpse inside and doesn't sound far different, based on interviews with evacuees, from what happened at other complexes the Express-News visited.
The first problems "involving drugs and destructive behavior" at Willow Springs surfaced within a week of completing the resettlement of some 40 Katrina evacuee families in October 2005. More would come and be joined by nonevacuee tenants.
Managers responded by hiring Willow Springs' first "courtesy officer," Bexar County district attorney's office investigator Joseph Piette.
The hire didn't seem to help. By month's end, residents were complaining at a meeting with Merced staff about "disruptive residents and unsupervised children," as well as trash dumping.
But those problems would very soon be the least of management's worries. Piette, who did not respond to an interview request, would move out and leave a few months later, citing fear for the safety of his own family.
Merced responded to residents' complaints with a stern measure of equanimity that would largely endure through the next difficult months. The company brought in parenting programs and organized children's activities, set up a 10 p.m. curfew and hosted job-training programs.
In return, the company encountered more problems, especially involving children, as Thanksgiving approached. Management had to evict several families for "disruptive behavior or involvement with drugs," including a case where the live-in boyfriend of a leaseholder was selling drugs.
On Nov. 20, management sent letters to residents beseeching them to exercise "parental responsibilities" and warned that Child Protective Services would be called to investigate "serious incidents involving children."
Still, management doled out the sweet with the sour. It made sure that Thanksgiving and Christmas were festive events, holding holiday parties and dinners for Katrina evacuees at a nearby mansion, inviting sports figures to attend and handing out gifts.
The New Year brought escalating problems. Guns began appearing where children played. The memo also pointed to a problem discerned elsewhere in San Antonio: criminal behavior that occurred when San Antonio locals mixed with Louisiana evacuees.
Case in point: A disagreement between small children escalated to older kids and then involved parents in a full-scale brawl.
"The dispute pitted New Orleans residents against San Antonio residents," the memo reported. "Some residents were beat up and one resident brought out a shotgun."
Since no one was arrested, police reports don't reflect this incident, suggesting criminal behavior was worse than the data show. In another incident that produced no arrest, the memo stated, "Someone fired a gun across the courtyard but no one was injured. The shooter was never identified."
No background checks
Before January was over, the complex's courtesy officer was calling for backup, citing a need for increased patrolling. Management staff sought help from the nonprofit anti-drug group San Antonio Fighting Back and called residents to mandatory meetings "to discuss security and safety."
Two Bexar County sheriff's deputies were hired off-duty to patrol for two weeks.
"Drug busts were made by the deputies," the memo stated.
But they had to be let go when the money ran out.
In February, management tried another approach to weed out the criminal element. Staff contacted the Bexar County district attorney's office "to determine whether any information was available on New Orleans residents who had criminal histories" so they could be "re-screened."
The evacuees had moved in so fast that management didn't have the time or wherewithal to conduct standard criminal background checks, and Louisiana at the time was refusing to release criminal history information to Texas authorities. The DA's office was able only to provide a list of serious sex offenders who were being apprehended.
It's unclear whether Merced was ever able to identify Louisianans with criminal histories that would disqualify them as tenants — a problem mirrored by police agencies and other apartment complexes' managers across the state.
The police response
On Feb. 8, management staff requested a meeting with several police officers assigned to the area "to discuss slow police response time."
An unidentified substation commander explained that "all police calls will not receive a response" and turned down management's request to establish some kind of regular police presence on site that would bring uniformed officers around and deter crime.
SAPD did offer a "Cellular on Patrol class" as a first step to establish a neighborhood watch program, but "attendance was low," the memo stated.
Meanwhile, problems continued both on and off Willow Springs property. In two incidents, residents crashed their vehicles into the complex's iron perimeter fence gates; one person reportedly was high on drugs.
And the gunplay around children continued.
"During Spring Break week, someone fired a gun across the courtyard during daylight while children were playing at the playground," the memo stated. "The rumor is that there was a dispute over drugs. No one was injured but many residents were frightened."
Management vowed to keep trying to develop a relationship with San Antonio police while looking for enough money to pay for private security.
Reached last week, the commander of the Police Department's eastern sector, Capt. Gary Smith, said he didn't consider the level of crime at Willow Springs any worse than many other area apartment complexes.
He acknowledged "we did have some problems with the whole service area" over the past year.
And although the captain didn't assign blame for any of the additional crime to evacuees, he conceded that others, including the apartment management, did.
Smith said crime in Willow Springs was actually reported frequently enough over the summer that Councilwoman Sheila McNeil personally intervened, requesting that a special police "Crime Response Team" task force be deployed to the complex. The request was denied.
Smith said he thinks police responded adequately to crime complaints at Willow Springs.
"I believe we assisted them as we would anyone else," he said.
But not everyone in law enforcement shared the official view of life at Willow Springs.
In March, district attorney's office investigator Piette quit working as a courtesy officer and moved out for safety reasons.
Piette left behind his assessment of the situation. Among the issues he cited was a rivalry between Katrina evacuees and San Antonio residents and disruption in the established San Antonio drug trade "by the new Katrina folks."
He also offered another assessment that had nothing to do with the drug trade: a lack of respect among evacuees. Two days after Piette quit, one Willow Spring resident held up another resident at gunpoint to rob him of a beer, the memo stated.
Meanwhile, disciplinary problems involving the children of evacuees had spread to the nearby Cameron Academy. At a meeting March 29 between school and apartment management officials, an assistant principal told management staff "that there are Katrina kids causing problems on campus."
Principal Carolyn McClure did not return a phone call seeking comment.
Still striving, management staff got creative, at one point seeking the advice of a "conflict resolution" consultant. Management continued to offer the evacuees what extras it could, including attendance for evacuee families at a San Antonio Spurs Easter event.
Two days later, on April 17, there was another shooting at the complex.
The troubles continued on through the summer, including a June incident that made all the newscasts.
Some armed youths got caught trying to steal the unmarked car of a deputy sheriff who had come to serve an arrest warrant. Shots were fired, and the youths holed up in the apartment manager's office until police SWAT team members extracted them.
A wall for security
In recent months, management staff also has been meeting with surrounding neighborhood associations to find ways to improve security. A spokeswoman for the Skyline Park Neighborhood Association said a key objective of the recent initiative was to get more police patrolling the area.
"My biggest thought is to let the Police Department handle the Police Department's work," said Kathy Harris, association president.
One neighbor mounted its own initiative — an RV park built a $100,000 wall to help instill a sense of security for tourist customers, two managers said.
"We never thought of putting a fence up before we started having all the problems across the street," assistant park manager Judy Swalley said. "I hate to say that, and I don't like judging people, but that would be the main reason why we're putting it up."
A corporate public relations official called several weeks later to say the wall had been planned all along and was not prompted by troubles at the neighboring complex.
By mid-July, when the Express-News began visiting Willow Springs for this report, several uniformed sheriff's deputies were living in the complex and helping to enforce a zero-tolerance policy that had 15-year-old evacuee Anthony Smith chafing.
"I'm getting tired of this, dog," he said. "I'm sick of it. They act like we damned criminals. We got a lease. We citizens."
As recently as last week, complex manager Guillen was declaring that victory was the result of not renewing evacuees' leases, en masse.
"It's so clean, so quiet," she said. "Everybody who wanted to move out wants to stay now."
---------------