It’s politically inconvenient for Boca Raton to have a heroin problem, but that does not change the fact that it does. Public relations and how things appear on paper are always important to politicians going into an election year.
Over the last 6 months, I’ve watched a crew of part time heroin dealers that are also full-time heroin addicts and full-time thieves cause mayhem in our city. This crews head count is growing and so is the crime in our city. I’ve done some research and been told that it takes one of these criminals approximately $400 a day to stay high. That is $146,000.00 per year needed per criminal. That means that an eight person crew needs to rob, steal and deal $1,168,000.00 per year to be them. That’s only one crew. There are more. A good chunk of that money comes from you, the constituents of this city. It comes from things that they steal from your cars, the things they rob from your house, and the things they shoplift from the stores you frequent. It also comes from the drugs they sell when they have enough money from selling stolen items to start dealing in order to support their own habits. Just by the nature of what they do, they multiply. If you are selling drugs to make money, you need more addicts. That circle keeps spinning and getting wider by the week.
A drug addict’s perception of things is pretty simple. They behave in a certain way. If there are no consequences for how they behave, they assume what they are doing is acceptable. I interact with a huge number of Boca Raton Police Officers. The PD wants to combat this problem and I obviously support them in this, and in everything else they do to keep Boca Raton safe. The only inference I can draw, is from the experience I had growing up in the shadow of NYC. I was a kid during the Koch and Dinkins administrations in New York. The City of New York’s official policy was that it didn’t have a raging drug problem if NYPD didn’t write paper day in and day out on street drug crimes. As a kid, seeing addicts passed out in the street with a needle hanging out of their arm gave me the experience necessary to see what is happening here.
If the politicians in our city are afraid of the optics that a growing drug problem in this city will have for them in the coming election, I would like them to consider this. This crew deals part time which means they have weapons on them. They are full time addicts which means you never know what they are going to do with those weapons. They are criminals and the laws that apply to your constituents have no meaning to them. What kind of Public Relations nightmare do you think you’re going to have on your hands if one of these criminals kills one of your constituents (or one of our tourists) in our city? If it happens, are you going to blame the weapon instead of the problem that stares all of us in the face on a daily basis? Food for thought. Elections are around the corner.
If you took the time to read this, when you see these criminals doing what they do…call 911. All of those calls logs are public record. If enough people report what they see, maybe we’ll get the restraints off of our officers and on the criminals that deserve them.
As always, thank you for reading the Blog at gunshinearms.com
