(I moved out of Bacliff at the end of August, just before the neighborhood was smashed by Hurricane Ike.)
Public officials in seaside Galveston County, Texas, have figured out how to make it look like their county isn’t overrun by crime: provide a safe haven, a virtual lawless zone, for criminals to operate.
Galveston County, located just south of Houston, is home to a large number of chemical plant operations and thus much of its populace is blue-collar; in recent years, more upscale residents have flocked to League City with the addition of a number of expensive developments such as Victory Lakes and Tuscan Lakes, and on Galveston Island itself, city and county officials have worked hard to turn the economically-depressed island into a vacation paradise.
But all that development has attracted more than its fair share of less reputable elements. The construction boon has attracted hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants – virtually every new residential development in the League City area employs them, and the city itself makes no effort to restrict illegals from working there (as long as they don’t live there). The expansion of wealth has also attracted drug dealers from Houston and created a number of home-grown ones, especially among the chronically lazy.
“Hey, I pay for my baby this way,” one 23-year-old mother openly advertises on her MySpace page. “I don’t care if it’s legal or not, I make more money doing this than working for Wal-Mart.”
Long a haven to outlaws and seedy elements, the county’s municipalities outside Galveston have been engaged in a concerted effort in recent years to control gangs and drug crime, and the result has been an improved image for cities like Texas City, LaMarque and Dickinson. That effort has been successful because the gang members have been moving in droves to unincorporated areas of the county – in particular the “cop-free” zone of Bacliff.
“I’ve lived here 30 years and it’s gone from good to bad to worse,” says “Joe,” a 67-year-old retiree who asked for anonymity to avoid retaliation. “At first it was just the bikers and their lot, they weren’t bad and over time they became good people. But now, these kids, it’s a circus out here 24 hours a day.”
Even the feds have gotten involved with Bacliff. On May 21, a federal task force arrested 10 members of the area’s 4th Street Blood Gang for cocaine and methamphetamine trafficking, and more indictments are expected. But local law enforcement is rarely seen.
At the intersection of 17th Street and Avenue A, a paid of shoes tied together is strung over a telephone line suspended above the street – the universal sign that drugs are sold here. Every residence in the immediate vicinity is inhabited by illegal immigrants, only a few of whom speak English. And those who do speak English are fond of certain terms.
“Get out of here you white motherfuckers!” screams one tattooed young man as a car drives past, flipping his middle finger at the driver while holding his other hand behind his back as if he had a concealed weapon.
Indeed, while the biggest impact on the area has been the influx of Hispanics – primarily Mexicans. And there is evidence to indicate that the new arrivals are not the hard-working types George W. Bush tells us are just here to do the jobs Americans won’t do.
At one residence on 15th Street, for example, there is very little grass in the yard – because it’s occupied by an average of 20 cars at any given time, from beat-up wrecks to brand-new Escalades and even a Hummer. Neighbors report dozens of people at a time flood into and out of the two-bedroom home, indicating strongly that those living there permanently may be involved in the smuggling of illegal aliens into the U.S.
“I tried contacting ICE to tell them about it, but they didn’t seem very interested,” says one neighbor, who also asked for anonymity to avoid retaliation.
Indeed, retaliation seems to be a key element which prevents the area’s law-abiding residents from fighting back.
“We had a lot of boom cars driving by my house one night because my husband gets out there and gets after them,” says one woman. “The next morning they waited until he left for work, then spray-painted my car with graffiti. They’ve bashed our mailbox before too. All the sheriff’s guys told us was well, maybe we ought to think about moving.”
The husband in question has been especially vocal about “boom cars” – gang members driving around with their stereo systems blasting deep bass “booms,” penetrating walls, rattling furniture and making it impossible for those with jobs to sleep in their off-hours.
“At one point I took to video-taping them, even following them to see where they were coming from, with the idea that I would turn that all over to the Sheriff to prosecute them,” he said. “Then one day these guys hopped out of their car and attacked me, grabbing my camera and throwing it into the bushes beside the road and threatening to kill me if I didn’t stop complaining about them. When the deputies arrived, they gave them a citation for terroristic threat – that’s all. The guys have since made it a habit to drive by my house intentionally four or five times a day.
“I don’t even bother trying to confront them any more,” he said. “The sheriff didn’t even want all the videos I’d made of the evidence, they said that unless they themselves witness it there’s not much they can do.”
The gangs and gang-wannabe’s are pretty open about who’s in charge of Bacliff now: they even advertise on MySpace. PunxNThugz Productions (www.myspace.com/punxsnthugprod) openly advertise their criminal affiliation with the use of an illegal weapon as their logo.
Some residents have attempted to get more help to fight back against the gangs, but they’ve been met by resistance above the level of the outmanned Galveston County Sheriff’s Department. Maj. Ray Tuttle of the Sheriff’s office in particular has been “extremely helpful,” according to many residents, but “their hands are tied because they don’t have any tools to work with.”
Sheriff’s deputies are forced to work with an outdated Texas noise-regulation law which requires them to measure the noise with a decibel-meter (the county has only one) and if only in effect after 9 p.m. at night.
“We got in touch with the county, they told us they can’t pass any ordinances restricting noise,” says the boom-car fighter. “So I tried contacting our state legislators. (State Rep. Craig) Eiland sent me back a nice little letter saying that someone else introduced legislation to improve the state nuisance-noise law last session and it got defeated, but he didn’t make any indication he was the least bit interested about it otherwise. I never heard back from my state senator.”
“I moved out here last year because I wanted to raise my little girls away from the big city,” says Jesse Bronson, 26. “But I’m afraid to let them play in the yard now because it seems like every time I look up there’s some Mexican walking down the street real slow looking at them. It scares me.”
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