Wednesday, KHOU-11’s Jason Whitely followed up on an earlier story about the predictable surge in crime at METRO’s Park and Pillage lots after the agency decided to remove live security personnel:
As we first told you last week Metro is trying to suppress a crime surge at its Park & Ride lots.
“It’s just tax money. Who cares?,” said Metro critic Tom Bazan.
But after our report, Bazan said Metro is overpaying for a system that won’t prevent anything.
“They were doing a better job of preventing crime when they were spending less. So it’s not a matter of how much money you throw at the problem it’s a matter of how effective you are,” Bazan said.
That may be true. Metro put guards in booths and only paid $1 million a year and crime was low.
But when money got tight, the transit agency got rid of the guards and crime surged more than 30 percent.
So Metro is now spending $16 million to install cameras and a public address system, gates that can be closed by remote control and emergency call stations.
But no guards.
“One security guard cannot see everything on a Park & Ride lot,” said Chief Tom Lambert, Metro Police Chief.
In his previous report, Whitely also described the surge in crime:
It’s not just bus riders. Park & Rides passengers are targeted too.
For the last fiscal year, thefts went up 16-percent. The incease in robberies was even more alarming.
They skyrocketed by 400-percent compared to the fiscal year before.
Add it all up and crimes at bus stops, along the light rail and at Park & Rides were up 32-percent in the last year.
METRO’s exciting (and expensive!) new blog was slow to post today (posts the previous two days have gone up in the 9:00 AM hour), so we suspected the PR flacks were hard at work spinning what any sane person had to regard as bad news (and perhaps even incompetence on the part of Chief Lambert). Sure enough, it took until 1:14 PM today for METRO’s blogger to Sit and Spin the news (no doubt with help from colleagues):
The crime rate has crept up
