COMMENTARY:
Las Cruces shouldn’t be like this. Last week, I was driving down Main Street by Albertson’s at lunch time and there was a guy stumbling down the sidewalk. I looked to see what was going on and made the mistake of making eye contact. He was talking to himself and obviously either drunk or on drugs. He got mad that I looked at him and started gesticulating and yelling at me. I was stuck in traffic and couldn’t go anywhere, while he continued to gesture and yell at me.
I was worried he was going to pick up a rock and throw it through my car window. That happens, especially in downtown Las Cruces. It’s so bad that the City even removed the rocks from around the trees in the downtown mall, to stop homeless guys from throwing rocks through the windows. Anyway, I finally got out of the Main Street traffic, but it shouldn’t be like this.
Then last Saturday, my teen daughter and I were at game night with some friends. The word “messy” came up in a game, and the next thing I knew, all the moms and daughters were talking about how messed up Las Cruces is now. One of my friends shared that she and her kids had to clean up a big nasty mess left by homeless men outside her husband’s business in downtown Las Cruces. One of the teen girls wants to carry pepper spray for protection because she’s worried about being attacked by one of the homeless vagrants in the downtown mall at night.
Another mom said she’s scared to take her kids to the library now, because there was a homeless guy there who was screaming in her face and going ballistic in the parking lot, for no reason at all. We all talked about how the area on Lohman near Best Buy and Sprout’s is especially dangerous because of so many vagrants hanging out there. There are big areas of town where safety is such a concern that we don’t want our daughters to apply for jobs at any of the businesses there.
And then there is the issue of public parks, which aren’t safe for families because of vagrants camping on playgrounds, drug paraphernalia (such as needles and drug-use foil), and open drug use (including cannabis, which is illegal to use in public places). This has gotten so bad that many moms are scared to take their kids to play at the parks now, especially in certain parts of town.
Meanwhile, millions of our tax dollars are funneled into homeless support such that Las Cruces is turning into a magnet for homeless people from around the country. The most recent point-in-time count of homeless people in NM found that over 1/3 are from out of state. The City of Las Cruces spends millions to build homeless housing, yet their “Housing First” approach has already been shown to be a danger to the neighborhood surrounding the Desert Hope apartments on Pecos and Foster. Clearly, the millions of dollars being spent are not resulting in fewer dangerous vagrants on our streets. Many of these vagrants are repeat-offenders who have long arrest records for violent crimes, yet they are continually allowed back out onto the streets. Their mental health and drug addiction problems aren’t being addressed properly, so the cycle continues on and on.
Enough is enough. Moms and Dads of Las Cruces: please share your stories by posting videos with the tag #FixLasCruces. The City is also running a priorities survey right now, so you can tell City Council to make public safety the top priority here: https://tinyurl.com/CLCpriorities
Sarah Smith co-leads the New Mexico Freedoms Alliance, a non-partisan statewide grassroots coalition. As a mother of two teens, she advocates for medical freedom, better education, and a safer community. Sarah also organizes a homeschool group for 125+ families, is a natural healthcare practitioner, and is a former NASA aerospace engineer. Sarah can be reached at concernedfornm@gmail.com.
Sarah Smith's opinions are her own and do not necessarily reflect the views of KRWG Public Media or NMSU.