Posted on 08/23/2008 4:54:06 AM PDT by stan_sipple
Ask virtually any store manager at the Saint Louis Galleria about shoplifting, and you'll invariably get two responses: One, it's out of control; and two, it's gotten exceedingly worse since August 2006, when MetroLink opened a stop just 500 yards from the high-end shopping center. In the first six months of this year, Richmond Heights police made 345 arrests at the mall. That's nearly double the number of arrests made in all of 2005, before MetroLink opened its Shrewsbury line. This year police are on pace to take 276 juveniles into custody for shoplifting and other offenses — a sevenfold increase over the 39 kids arrested at the Galleria in 2005. "I know it's not politically correct, but how else do you explain it?" comments a frustrated Galleria store manager who, like many Galleria shopkeepers interviewed by Riverfront Times, says her employer prohibits her from officially speaking for the company. Four months later in March, another fight in the mall — this one involving up to 100 teens — led to three more arrests and the Galleria imposing new sanctions on teenagers. The so-called "Parental Guidance Required" policy, put in place in April 2007, prohibits anyone under age seventeen from entering the mall after 3 p.m. on weekends without an adult chaperone. In recent weeks dozens of those same teens have been implicated in violent attacks that have hospitalized people working and living near the light rail stations in the Loop and the nearby DeBaliviere neighborhood. On July 26 a group of at least twenty teens assailed a family as they left the platform at the Forest Park-DeBaliviere station. That same night another group, according to police, attacked a person at the Delmar station.
(Excerpt) Read more at riverfronttimes.com ...
City trains move the gang crime to the suburbs, so more people can share fair.
Some years ago SEPTA went on strike and buses to the suburban malls stopped running. The King of Prussia mall reported a 75% drop in shoplifting during the strike.
But you can’t profile.
"I thought for sure it would pass, and then someone on the MetroLink campaign made the decision to advertise that the train would connect Mid Rivers Mall with East St. Louis," Aytes recalls. "That pretty much killed it right there. Soon you had people saying MetroLink riders would come to St. Charles by train and leave by car — stolen car."
Ten years later and a growing number of Saint Louis Galleria and Delmar Loop merchants worry that St. Charles voters may have been right: that maybe MetroLink actually enables criminals, especially teenage lawbreakers.
So pretty much the way I understand it was that there was a proposal to link MetroLink from the 'hood to the shopping malls but the people who shopped at the malls were concerned about the crime that this would bring (imagine that) so they voted against the measure. Then the government went ahead and built the link despite the proposal being killed by the voters? Am I reading this right?
It's racist if you notice those things. /sarc
Ironic...this is the third time within a few months that I’ve heard of someone named Unique.
For weird names, you can’t beat Sh*thead (pronounced sha-TEED) and A**hole (pronounced ASH-olay). I swear I’m not making these up. These are actual names!
Can you imagine? “This is my son, Sh*thead, and my daughter, A**hole.”
There is a chain of “alternative” newspapers in Florida, and many other states, as well. They are largely Libtard in editorial orientation, and funded by ads for restaurants, bars, tattoo parlors and sex services like phone sex and “escorts”.
Bah! Humbuggery!
I’ve seen this before. Adding regional bus service is what ultimately destroyed Parmatown Mall in Parma, Ohio. The deadbeats ride the taxpayer-funded bus to the mall, rob it, and ride the bus back home.
With all due respect, I must disagree. Simply by returning to an old and proven method of law enforcement, we could cut prison costs to a mere fraction of their now exorbitant levels, and produce a nation of self regulating citizens.
Bring Back Bounties! Make a dead violent criminal worth the cost of a year's incarceration and crime would drop to a fraction of today's criminal activity..
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