A personal story worth sharing

Perhaps it is my advancing age. Although I still believe I’m younger than most trees, especially those located in the California redwoods, I am fast approaching celebrating being on this planet for almost three quarters of a century. So I’m going to blame forgetting about this incident on old-fogey memory loss and my thanks go out to those citizens who reminded me about it.

As I have written here many times, I recently moved to Kyle from Dallas. The neighborhood I lived in there is called Lake Highlands, located in far northeast Dallas. Lake Highlands is 14.8 square miles with a population of 84,181 individuals. By comparison, the entire city of Kyle is just 6 square miles with a population of around 34,000. Lake Highlands has three zip codes and although it is located entirely within the city limits of Dallas, the public schools in Lake Highlands are not part of the Dallas Independent School District; they belong to the Richardson ISD. Richardson, for those who don’t know, is a suburban city that borders Dallas to the north.

In fact, it was because of the schools I moved to Lake Highlands more than 30 years ago. I was a single parent and the Richardson public schools were known to be far superior to those in Dallas. It meant I had to pay a lot more in property taxes — Dallas city taxes were higher than Richardson’s and Richardson’s school tax rate was higher than the Dallas rates. But as any parent who cares about the future of their children will attest, it’s worth it if it means providing your children with a superior education.

Lake Highlands is made up of a smidgen of retail, not nearly as much or of the quality the residents would prefer; a smattering of mostly vacant office buildings, most of which are located along the LBJ Freeway corridor; and a whole lot of residential. I would guess that 85 percent of the residential land mass was single family and 15 percent was multi-family. The median price of a home in Lake Highlands is $368,750 and many of those homes, including all of those located in the area known as "Old Lake Highlands," have been there since the 1930s. We’re talking about a nice, established neighborhood.

If you have ever spent any time in Dallas or know about it just through anecdotal evidence, you are aware that South Dallas, especially the area around Fair Park, has the reputation of being the least safe, most crime-ridden section of the city. That, however, is not true. I hate to report this, but Lake Highlands has the distinction of having far higher crime statistics than any other part of the city. (The Dallas Police Department posts area-by-area crime statistics, updated daily, for the entire public to see on its web site.)

When I worked for the City of Dallas and later as president of the Northeast Dallas Chamber of Commerce I worked alongside a distinguished gentleman by the name of David Brown, one of the finest police officers it has my privilege to know. At the time, he was the commander of the Northeast Dallas Police Substation; today he is Dallas’s chief of police. We worked together developing programs designed to reduce those crime stats. One of the things Brown shared with me was that over 98 percent of all the crimes committed in Lake Highlands were drug related. Gang crime was also prevalent, but even that was drug related. Most of the apartment complexes in Lake Highlands contained at least one meth lab and rival gangs freely and openly patrolled the apartment complexes selling those drugs to those anxious to buy them. Prostitution, which was nothing more than the attempt by many women to make the money they needed to buy drugs, was rampant.

But property crime in the single family areas was also higher in Lake Highlands than anywhere else in the city. That was because drug addicts were always breaking into homes in Lake Highlands, hoping to come away with valuables they could sell to get money to buy drugs.

One of the programs Chief Brown and I designed was something called COP, which stood for Citizens on Patrol. Chief Brown designated one of his officers to design and create a training program Lake Highlands residents could take to learn how to effectively patrol their neighborhoods. These citizens could not be armed and could not even approach suspected criminal activity, let alone try to apprehend anyone. But they were taught how to spot suspicious activity and report it.

We also did something else. Several years ago, more than 50 percent of the property owners in Lake Highlands signed a petition to create a PID. The assessments we paid into this PID were used to pay for private security firms to patrol our neighborhoods and provide an additional level of security. It worked. Property crime declined an astounding 82 percent. The PID was created, designed and written so that veterans and property owners aged 65 and older were exempt from paying the PID assessments.

Now, you have heard people — even elected officials — stand up and say something like this is impossible, it can’t be done, it has never even been attempted.

But we did it.

So here’s the lesson in all this. If you ever have the opportunity to live somewhere where neighbors truly care about each other, where citizens are willing do to whatever it takes to work together to solve a problem in the fairest way imagineable, you can and will discover anything is possible, if you just try.

Where we would be today if all the scientists in the world believed those who told them "That’s impossible. It can’t be done." Believe me, I’ve lived long enough to know that just about anything is possible if you want it badly enough and if you care about your fellow human beings enough.