In America, the bad guys are winning
/The Boston Herald
April 9, 1993
BEVERLY BECKHAM
It's a wonder the news didn't break on the business pages: "Violence Has Miami Tourists Wary. Florida's Top Industry Fears a Deadly Image."
A mark, a yen, a buck, a pound - it's these that make the world go 'round.
The killing of a 39-year-old woman, tourist or not, is redundant. It's been done a thousand times before. Somebody rear-ends a car. The driver stops, gets out and is beaten and killed. This is an old script.
Throw in a 6-year-old eyewitness, and it's still old.
What makes it new, what makes it news - this murder of Barbara Jensen Meller, a tourist from Berlin killed in Miami last Friday - is that this time money is involved, big money. Florida's number one squeeze is no longer oranges. It's people, tourists from all over the country and all over the world. Tourists spend $28 billion a year in this paved paradise.
Foreign tourists spent $72 billion touring the U.S. last year. If word gets out that our streets not only aren't paved with gold but are deadly, the tourists will take their curiosity and their currency somewhere else.
So it is with an eye toward reassuring the masses that they will be safe while visiting the Sunshine State, that Miami is directing its best efforts. Action has already been taken to remove license plate markings that identify cars as rented. The city plans to post more signs along its four major highways so tourists will be less likely to get lost.
And Alamo Rent-a-Car plans to give out brochures to tourists, full of life-saving tips, like make sure you keep your doors locked while you're driving; never stop on a deserted road even if someone flags you down; and don't get out of your car even if you are rear-ended.
The company will not, however, go so far as to identify the city's danger zones so that tourists can avoid them. "To do so," wrote the New York Times, "would give a false impression that those are the only places where people could be at risk."
And what a false impression that would be. Since December, at least six foreign tourists have been murdered in Florida - two Germans, two Canadians and a Venezuelan were shot to death while walking in different neighborhoods in what police say were robbery attempts. A New Yorker visiting Florida was abducted at a shopping mall and set on fire. And just four days before Meller's murder, German tourist Karl Wilhelm Schmidt, 50, and his 15-year-old son, Kristopher, were shot by four teen-agers. A single bullet went through the father's leg and lodged in his son's.
Nice place America. So much for Southern hospitality.
And how is Florida handling this? By putting all its resources into ferreting out the lowlife who prey on the vulnerable? By cleaning up the no-drive-thru areas? By arresting those with illegal guns and illegal drugs? By locking up human beings who give the species a bad name?
No, they're doing it the way we do most things in this country - with smoke and mirrors, with big time public relations.
We are in the habit of cutting a swath around our problems in the good, old U.S.A. We like to pretend we have none. If a place is dangerous, we avoid it. If a neighborhood's bad, we move. If there's trouble somewhere, we go somewhere else. We don't walk alone. We don't go out at night alone. We never park in a deserted lot or a deserted street. We don't to talk to strangers. We don't make eye contact.
If tourists are being killed, we change their car rental plates and hand them brochures on how to survive in America.
And we tell ourselves all this is normal. We're just doing what we have to do. But what we're really doing is burying our head in the sand.
"I'm concerned for the security of my citizens," the German consul general told The Miami Herald. "The increase of physical injury and killing is getting much higher than any comparable civilized place around the world."
The world sees what we refuse to see.
There are dozens of reasons why people rob, rape, terrorize and kill. They're desensitized, unloved, misunderstood, deprived.
But the number one reason is because they know they can. The criminal rules the roost here. The criminal can go anywhere - and does. It's the ordinary person who locks his doors and doesn't go out at night and lives behind camouflaged bars.
"I told them, `Don't go anywhere,' to stay in the hotel, `no rental cars, no taking the bus,"' said a travel guide who arrived in Miami with 38 German tourists two days after Meller's murder.
Miami officials are working hard to create a safe path that tourists can take around the city's problems. But this isn't a solution. It's an evasion, another capitulation.
The bad guys are winning here in America. The whole world sees this. When will we?
