On treating ants

A couple of times a year, the fire-ants build mounds in my yard and gardens – and even though there are better (long term) alternatives, I treat some of those mounds with the stinkiest, most aggressive “mound-killer” I can find. Every time, the result is the same: the little beasts scurry elsewhere and set up shop again – lurking and waiting to gnaw my feet and ankles.
Fire-ant season is underway here, but that’s not really why they’ve been on my mind. I’m pondering a different kind of fire-ant — not in my grass or gardens, but in the recent news about Houston and New Orleans crime rates. Somehow, they’re both on the rise. What’s with that? Are the criminals cloning or something? From the Times-Picayune’s editorial pages this weekend:

But the reprieve from violent crime is ending. And unless New Orleans’ criminal justice system gets the problem under control quickly, the resurgence of crime will imperil the city’s future. […]
Unfortunately, the criminal justice system was in poor shape even before the storm.

And from the Houston Chronicle:

The number of homicides in Houston rose nearly 25 percent during the first three months of 2006, compared with the same period last year, despite a multimillion-dollar police effort in the city’s most crime-ridden areas.

Now, before everybody starts jumping up and down and yelping about the evacuees again, there are a couple other little tidbits that have surfaced in recent weeks:

Of the handful of Latino gang members arrested in recent weeks, police said, all have acknowledged their gang affiliation but maintained they had come to New Orleans looking to earn an honest living. Three members of a violent South American gang were arrested recently in St. Bernard Parish, not for violence or drugs but for property crimes unrelated to their gang affiliation, authorities said.
“All the graffiti we’re seeing is not gang-related,” Riley said. “But there is some indication that there are a number of Hispanic gang members in town working, part of the work force brought to this city by the storm. At this point, there is no indication that they are criminally active.”

And this:

But a Houston Chronicle analysis of 326 homicides that occurred in the city last year shows that those trends were obvious long before the first evacuee-related slaying and the year-end spike that prompted Police Chief Harold Hurtt to direct resources and public attention to these problem areas.
Hurtt last week admitted that HPD was slow to identify the patterns. But he blamed a staffing shortage that grew worse over the last year and outmoded tools for crime analysis.

So what’s the answer to this mess? Well, given that Houston has only 1.2 officers per 1,000 residents these days (still in that downward trend, amazingly), Polimom thinks MORE OFFICERS might be in order! Mayor White needs to stop being wishy-washy about those classes.
For New Orleans, the question is harder. On the good news side, there seem to be better relationships between the police and citizens now. On the bad news side, of course, are the miles and miles of empty houses and buildings — ant bed potential galore.
From both sides, though, a more comprehensive treatment plan appears to be in order, because until we start aggressively treating the entire problem — which includes the obvious scurry-path up and down the Gulf Coast on I-10 — we’re likely to just keep chasing them from one nest to the other.