Tense Times In La Marque

We have one question for La Marque: What the hell is going on down there?

There’s a crime spree, the City Manager might or might not be keeping his job, and the Mayor resigned. That’s just this week. No telling what’s gonna happen next.

La Marque is the kind of small town where the city council members post their home phone numbers on the town website and homes, not businesses, take up most of Main Street. At the last official count, the population was just over 13,000. As most people would expect, the city’s crime rate has always been pretty low.

Not anymore.

It’s been on the rise for the last several months; with the holidays
activity increased, especially robberies and home invasions (reportedly
complete with ski masks and assault rifles). The trouble is the
holidays are over and the stats aren’t going down.

All in all,
in 2008 La Marque PD had a 20 percent increase in the total numbers of calls
they answered and are averaging about five arrests a day. That prompted
the City Council, with its outgoing Mayor in the lead, to call Police
Chief Richard Price in for a meeting. Price told them the usual — he
needs more money and more officers in order to get a handle on things.
They told him the usual, he’s not getting either one anytime soon.

Price isn’t the only one in hot water for the rise in crimes.
City Manager Robert Ewart is also being blamed. Monday night Ewart was
called in to a closed-door session with the city council, where a lot
of folks expected him to be fired. Ewart left the meeting with his job
— for now — and a mandate to improve his performance, including finding
grant money to boost the city budget.

To their credit, neither
Price nor Ewart have pointed their fingers at the Hurricane Katrina and
Hurricane Ike refugees who have come in to La Marque as being the root of
all the town’s evils, as some officials in other small towns have done. Ewart
admits they are a factor but he makes it clear that they alone are not
the cause for the changes in crime.

Ewart told Hair Balls
“I’m not a criminal justice expert or anything, but I think there are a
lot of factors that are in play. I think [the crime rate] has a lot to do
with the hurricane and people being displaced, sure. And the economy,
too. Lot’s of houses were lost on Galveston Island, and those people
had to go somewhere. Some of them came to La Marque.

“When you
put more people in one place, you automatically have more crime. It
doesn’t matter where the new residents are from, just having more
people does it. If you look at what’s happening in Texas City,
Hitchcock and the other mainland cities, you’ll see it’s the same
everywhere. It’s not just La Marque. We’re not special.”

Well, having home invasions on trailer houses and low-rent apartments, which La Marque does, actually is kinda special.

“We’re
seeing that most of the time people who are doing that know each
other,” Ewart says. “That makes it harder to investigate. A lot of the
time it’s a friend, or somebody the friend knows.”

Now about
that mayor — he’s leaving. He got married recently and the couple is
moving out of town. That leaves the City Council with the Mayor Pro-Tem
in charge and one seat open until elections in May. “Let’s wait and see
what happens in May” and “Let the next guy do it” excuses for inaction
have no doubt already started to fly around the council’s meeting room.

Is La Marque special? Is it facing unique problems? According
to its City Manager, no. All the smaller towns in the area are going
through the same thing, for the same reasons.

But even Ewart has to admit, La Marque’s had a very busy week.

— Olivia Flores Alvarez