For what seems like a really long time now there have been numerous cars going up in flames in the charming Dallas neighborhood of Oak Cliff. Some twenty odd cars have now been torched, of course the vast majority of them are in the more poor, or middle-income areas. I don’t know the area well, but I imagine this is happening for people who don’t have the financial flexibility to quickly bounce back, I’m sure most of them carry only State mandated liability.
Dallas authorities were baffled as they completely ignored the situation, even after the short period of time where even the most amateur crime investigator could see that this was an epidemic and growing problem. Hell, this isn’t in Highland Park, why the fuck should they care if a bunch of rubes down in the po’ part o’ town get their cars flambéed. They probably needed a new one anyway, right? Besides, there are a lot people in much nicer parts of town that deserve to be protected by hooligans and ruffians. Why doesn’t anyone ever think of them? They pay a lot of taxes and put a lot of money in the pockets campaigns of local officials, we have to take care of them.
So now we sit at, I believe, twenty-five plus automobiles immolated by these miscreants and what was a charming little area of Dallas now has a very ominous cloud swirling above it. If there is one ray of light bravely reaching the ground through the fog it’s that a Constable’s car got hit a week or so ago, and evidently the Dallas Police, Fire and powers-that-be now have to be outraged by this suddenly critical problem. It is reassuring in that we at least know they have a threshold that will trigger reaction, though I wonder without the Constable’s car what that threshold would have been.
I’m not sure where the concept of people throwing Molotov cocktails out of moving vehicles on to other people’s property doesn’t become a very serious problem on day one, but it really makes me afraid that when this sort of shit goes down I, or anyone else ,won’t have any realistic expectation of justice. And I understand that this is a difficult criminal act to catch in progress, the DPD can’t have cars on every corner at all hours of the night, but it would have been just a little reassuring if someone could have come out and said, “Hey, we’re taking this seriously, we’re going to step up patrols and encourage folks living in these neighborhoods to heighten their vigilance”. Instead, as a yokel watching the evening news it seemed like Dallas was doing a big shoulder shrug, scratching their head and saying, “Gee, ain’t that a kick in the ass, sure hope it don’t happen again, good luck with that buddy”.
Anyway, that’s how I see it from East Dallas. So far we’re only dealing with a lot of glass on neighborhood streets, no automobile barbeques yet.