Rural Banter

Author: ERICA GOODMAN

In small towns where the village center usually consists of a main road and two, maybe three more densely populated avenues, parents generally do not warn their children to stay "off da street." Instead of the sight of drug hustlin', the streets in rural villages are simply what you cross to get to the other side. The "bad kids" (i.e. those who smoke cigarettes) in my hometown dealt their wares in the mysterious place known as "behind the school bus garage," and staying away from there, explained McGruff the Crime Dog (or was it Biggie Smalls?), would assure us to get from negative to positive, it's all good.

Nostalgic images of rural America today still suggest that small towns, farming communities and the open country are "crime free." Relative to the problems of some large urban communities, rural areas do look like havens of safety. Yet for the news media, crime would seem to be the only thing in rural America worth talking about. A recent report from the W.K. Kellog Foundation regarding perceptions of rural America in the media found that 78 percent of TV news stories with the appearance of the word "rural" focused on crime. Print media has shared an equally shocking attention to the threats of living in the dangerous countryside.

The press attention may seem a negative interpretation of rural life, but it also sheds light upon very real problems. Apart from unusual and out of the ordinary violent crime, criminal news about rural communities generally focuses on drug problems. In the last several years, news stories have centered on the boom of methamphetamines. Forget the streets of Compton. "Rural roads," warns a reporter from the Oregon paper the Mail Tribune, "are crime magnets." Recent press attention to "meth" use has described the spread of the highly addictive drug as if it were the plague. "It's creeping," warns one Minnesota paper. "It's coming your way."

In some communities where meth-related crimes have been particularly awful, there is too much criminal activity for the county sheriff to control. Citizens throughout rural communities have vowed to take action into their own hands. As a resident of Savage Creek, Ore., explains in the Tribune, "It's our community and we want to take it back for the people who are living here peacefully. We're not vigilantes. We're not sitting out there with shotguns, waiting for them - because they stole my shotgun."

Drug-related crime in the United States takes on a multitude of faces and hits us in the largest and smallest communities. And so, without their trusty 12-guage, the people of rural America are trying to take back their communities from the behind-the-bus-garage criminals. Only with time, and the continued media attention to rural drug problems, will they be successful in taking a bite out of crime.