Iowa is a great place to live. It’s cheap, it’s easy. It’s safe. Storm Lake is all that in spades.
I can drive across town in seven minutes at 25 mph. You can still buy a house for $100,000 around here. The neighbors on Irving Street are great, and they have an eye on each other. Dean and Josie Ellington invite everyone to their garage for the National Night Out potluck. They love up the men and women in blue and the firefighters. No problems here.
The police chief turned an armored vehicle into an ice cream service for kids. He could still ram you with it, but he doesn’t need to.
Dolores walks newshound Peach through the park in dark of night with never a worry. If you decided to hang around the park all night on a picnic table, an officer is likely to check on you.
Nearly all crime in Storm Lake is among people who know each other well. By far, most of the problems involve substance abuse, chiefly alcohol, and domestic assault that is so often driven by substance abuse. A public health problem turns into a crime problem. I cannot remember the last armed robbery. Burglary is not much of a thing, because they know their career will get cut short here. Storm Lake has had its share of truly bad actors, but the police generally run off the riff raff or lock them up.
The Storm Lake Police are visible on the streets. They almost always catch the bad guys. Crime rose in the 1990s with an influx of young males and leveled off. Immigrants have been found to commit crimes at no greater rate than Anglos who were born here.
When there was a Black Lives Matter rally in Chautauqua Park in Storm Lake, a large crowd knelt in silence with the police.
This is one of the safest places in the world, even if we are all armed to the teeth. We really don’t need the firepower but it’s there in case the Peruvians or Sac Countians invade.
Name me a safer city than Des Moines. We sent precious daughter Clare to Drake University in one of the tougher parts of town and never worried for a minute. Drive around the Drake campus slowly checking things out and soon you will have a Bulldog security car on your tail. How many muggings have you heard of in Cedar Rapids?
It’s bogus, then, for Gov. Kim Reynolds to use crime and fear as her campaign motif.
Her first TV ad featuring Rep. Cori Bush, D-Missouri, talking about defunding the police has absolutely nothing to do with Iowa. She is from Ferguson, Mo. I think we can all acknowledge that Bush has a legitimate complaint with the Ferguson Police Department. It is not being defunded but it is being reformed. And, Cori Bush is not Deidre DeJear, a Black woman who is the Democratic nominee for governor.
Storm Lake has tried to build its police force through the years in size and salary. The department is well-trained. It works in the school system. Absolutely nobody is talking about defunding the police or sheriff. Crime is not exactly a top of mind issue, either. Safety is. Storm Lake would be safer if all immigrants could come out of the shadows, if they were not afraid of contact with government. The police here do not arrest people for being undocumented, trying to relieve fear and foster cooperation. It works.
That’s what the governor should concentrate on.
That, and clean air and water, and well-funded schools from toddler to university. Iowans live here because of those things. Our air and water are not so clean. Our state universities are choked, and the governor is suing to stop student debt relief while increasing tuition. Storm Lake is having a hard time finding and keeping teachers — the strings program is dead. What a shame. It’s one of those things that makes Storm Lake great.
How can we reduce the cost of higher education so young people can maintain families in the rural Iowa we love? How can we increase public health efforts to reduce substance abuse and, thus, a host of other problems that confront police? How can we protect our drinking water supplies — Storm Lake has an $83 million tab on that front with no way to pay for it. These are the real problems Iowa faces. Reynolds is playing to some other crowd, and it denies us all a real discussion of how to make this place even better. That’s a crime against the body politic. We’re letting her get away with it.
Art Cullen is editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in northwest Iowa (stormlake.com). He won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 2017 and is author of the book “Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from America’s Heartland.” Email times@storm lake.com.
From The Progressive Populist, November 15, 2022
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