Todd Bensman

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Todd Bensman

11/02/06 San Antonio Katrina Crime

Hope you remember Todd Bensman, formerly a reporter for The Dallas Morning News and CBS-11. He's now in San Antonio, turning up the same great stuff he did at CBS-11. Dallas sure misses his exposes. Pour yourself a glass of wine and settle down for a long ride. sb

Katrina crime: Perceived or real? Web Posted: 10/29/2006 12:49 AM CDT
Todd Bensman Express-News Staff

   Just days after the first of about 30,000 Louisiana hurricane evacuees began arriving in San Antonio, Mayor Phil Hardberger was asked a simple question he laughingly brushed off. What might be the impact of the influx on city crime rates and services?

   It was Sept. 7, 2005, and the mayor was riding high on national praise for a CNN appearance during which he had projected an image of his city as unflinchingly philanthropic. People displaced by Katrina still were flooding in.

   "That's like if my house is on fire and I'm looking to you for a bucket of water, and you ask what the new house will look like," he said with a laugh. "Everybody's been worried about crime, and the impact on social services. But so far, it is just worry; it hasn't been factual."

   More than a year later, the issue remains unaddressed, conspicuously so in light of a 55 percent spike in murders the first eight months of this year, increasing violent crime rates in San Antonio, a stretched police force and widespread media reports linking some evacuees in Houston to similar crime trends there....

S.A. killings show few ties to storm
Web Posted: 10/29/2006 12:59 AM CDT
Todd Bensman   Express-News Staff

   There's no misinterpreting the cold, hard statistic of a dead body.

   The indisputability of murder victims is why the city of Houston has continued citing a growing number of them in requests for millions of dollars in federal aid since 150,000 Katrina hurricane evacuees arrived last fall.

   The city blames elements of that imported population for most of a 25 percent murder spike after identifying either bodies, arrested suspects, or both, as evacuees from Louisiana.

    But in San Antonio, where a declining murder rate jumped shortly after about 30,000 evacuees arrived in September 2005, city officials have expressed no interest in knowing whether evacuees were involved.

    The murder spike between January and August of this year ? 85 compared with 55 for the first eight months of last year ? was pushing 55 percent. ...

Complex with Katrina evacuees became a criminal haven
Web Posted: 10/30/2006 01:34 AM CST
Todd Bensman Express-News Staff

Second of two parts.

Maybe it was the armed and uniformed peace officers induced by rent breaks who moved in. Or maybe it's just because enough of the troublemakers have moved out.

Whatever the cause, a fragile sense of peace has replaced chaos and fear since management started kicking out dozens of mostly young and male Katrina evacuees over the summer at the 248-unit Artisan at Willow Springs Apartments.

"It was hell," said New Orleans evacuee Lashawn Mason, a young mother who lives at Willow Springs. "They had the police running up in here pulling guns. It was all this drama all the time."

While the relative calm is welcome, it's still interrupted. Mason said the other day someone pulled out an AK-47 and began firing in the air.

The complex's first year in the 500 block of Gembler Road has been rough, starting the day in September 2005 when it opened its new gates to its first residents ? evacuees. Over time it gained a reputation on the streets of East San Antonio as a criminal hot spot.

Since the city declined to track whether increases in crime were related to 30,000 displaced New Orleans residents who came to San Antonio, there are no firm numbers to show whether or how much crime went up because of the influx. ...

In one area with evacuees, robbery is routine
Web Posted: 10/30/2006 01:34 AM CST

Todd Bensman Express-News Staff

   Fear gripped Vanessa De la Garza when she saw the two men stride purposefully through the store. They were wearing full-faced ski masks and basketball shorts on a pleasantly mild October night last year.

   One of the masked men had a gun clutched in each fist as De la Garza stood behind her cash register at the Pep Boys auto parts store on W.W. White Road.

... "I was pretty scared," De la Garza said recently. "They were getting kind of crazy there toward the end. I'd never been robbed before."

   An event that may have seemed highly unusual to the cashier has come to be viewed as almost routine along W.W. White Road over the past year.

   Armed robbers have hit mom-and-pop eateries such as Chatman's Chicken, major national chains such as Walgreens and Advance Auto Parts, liquor stores, fast-food restaurants, laundromats and gas stations. In fact, it's hard to find a business anywhere along a 10-mile stretch of W.W. White and an intersecting part of Rigsby Road that hasn't been robbed in the past year....

Ward politics is the Devil's key to the soul of the city council. It is how some council members got themselves in trouble in the past. It is the bait that will get others in trouble in the future. 4/6/8

In one area with evacuees, robbery is routine Web Posted: 10/30/2006 01:34 AM CST

In one area with evacuees, robbery is routine
Web Posted: 10/30/2006 01:34 AM CST