It’s The Armadillo!
PEORIA, Ill. — This industrial city, hard hit by the recession, has found a new, low-budget way to fight crime: Park an unmanned, former Brink’s truck bristling with video cameras in front of the dwellings of troublemakers.
Police here call it the Armadillo. They say it has restored quiet to some formerly rowdy streets. Neighbors’ calls for help have dropped sharply. About half of the truck’s targets have fled the neighborhood.
“The truck is meant to be obnoxious and to cause shame,” says Peoria Police Chief Steven Settingsgaard.
The Armadillo has helped alleviate problems like drug dealing that can make neighborhoods unlivable.
Police got a call at 2:30 one morning from Mary Smith, a 58-year-old computer operator at a Butternut Bread Bakery. Fighting back tears, she asked for relief from her neighbors’ incessant yelling.
She and her husband, Terry, 61, a Butternut baker, have lived in their home on North Wisconsin Avenue for 30 years, and have seen the neighborhood fall into drug trafficking. The police suggested using the Armadillo.
That weekend, the truck pulled up to the offending neighbor’s house. A police officer knocked on the door and told the residents a nuisance report had been filed. Within 24 hours, the Smiths say, the house was quiet. The occupants moved out soon thereafter.
“The difference was like night and day,” Mrs. Smith says. The landlord, Phil Schertz, credits the Armadillo.
I think it needs more lights. But it’ll do for now. Especially seeing as how the current plan is to burn the dealer’s house to the ground.
That option is seen as drastic by some folks. Maybe it is, but it is also very effective.
I would totally support burning drug dealer’s houses only if the dealer was locked in the house at the time. Unfortunately, most DD’s deal out of rented facilities, so all it would do is harm an innocent landlord.
I also don’t think shame has a farking thing to do with it. It’s customer’s fear of being positively identified as a drug buyer/user.
I’ll wager some of the dealer’s customers are upstanding, God fearing, pillars of the community who would be in some seriously deep shite should their drug use become general knowlege.
Gerry N.
You do need to inform the landlord, anonymously, of the goings on before setting the match. He/she has one week to issue the eviction notice before flaming the residence.