Las Vegas Growth Pains

Las Vegas Growth Pains

OK. My turn to rant. I'm losing my beautiful Vegas.

I remember when New York City had a campaign to reduce crime in the city. At the time the murder statistics were something like one murder a day in Manhattan, which was deemed shocking at the time. Now the newest statistics are out for Las Vegas - it is something like the forth most dangerous city, according to the newest survey. Vegas now has the same murder rate that motivated Mayors Koch and Giuliani to clean up the city. Besides the diurnal murder, Vegas has a robbery every hour, a car is stolen every 10 minutes, etc., etc...

I used to frequent restaurants and casinos in some of the worst areas of Vegas (see my web page) and not feel especially threatened, I took normal precautions - just circumspection and vigilance walking to and from my car. Now I'm having second thoughts about visiting some of these crime ridden areas of the city. Just the other day, for example, an off duty police officer was car jacked in one of these bad areas, not far from the casinos on Fremont Street - he did not fight back for his own safety, thank God they didn't kill him. The crazy thugs took his gun, his badge, and his privately owned vehicle.

My wife is a nurse who visits peoples' homes in Las Vegas, and I find I have to accompany her wherever she goes, especially in some Vegas neighborhoods after dark. She carries mace and I sometimes wish I had a concealed weapon permit. (Yeah, all you gun control people out there read my lips: if it meant saving your family's life you probably would wish you had a weapon available too!)

Don't try to find too many local or even national news articles on Las Vegas' ranking in this new survey. It's bad for business in Las Vegas, and somehow this information is magically suppressed. But I doubt if these new statistics will affect the nearly 300,000 visitors who come here every weekend, they are probably safe enough in the big hotels on the strip. I don't live in Vegas. I live in Henderson, a suburban city in its own right, just south of Vegas. Henderson fared much better in the new survey. It does not yet have the influx of gangs and illegal aliens that is plaguing Vegas, but it does have the same tremendous growth that will inevitably lead to the same problems neighboring Vegas has.

I just tuned into the "new" morning news talk station KDWN and they have changed their programming format to sound just like a Los Angeles station I used to listen to. Instead of the old format of some old guy sharing recipes with grandma, it now reports every damn crime as it is occurring. I understand that bad news sells, but I will no longer listen to this station - I'd rather not think too much about what is happening to my beautiful Vegas.

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