It was nice to see that the people who run the city of Lockport have finally taken notice of what is going on around here and decided to ask our opinion on the matter. The city held a meeting that was designed to discuss the dramatic rise in crime. I couldn’t be there because I was with the most important person in my life celebrating her birthday. But I actually do take a level of comfort in knowing that the city sees the problem for what it really is.

When I was a kid, an “impact zone” would have been completely unnecessary. Everyone knew where the bad guys were and the bad guys stayed on their own turf. No one really knew what was going on in that part of the city, except the people living there, and no one really wanted to know. Back then, you could move to a different part of the city if things got too real in the bad part of town.

Today, it is hard to say where people can move where they are no longer either participants or first-hand witnesses to crime. Drugs are everywhere in Lockport and shootings are a regular part of life around here. What happened? When did we lose control of our city?

The scaling down of Harrison’s (Delphi) has a lot to do with the current state of our city. When people had good jobs at Harrison’s, there was a strong sense of protecting something good. The thousands of people who worked at the plant wanted to keep their good lives going, so crime was something that just never seemed to exist on a wider scale.

Maybe my view of Lockport from a few decades ago is seen through rose-colored glasses, and I am sure that others will vehemently correct me on Facebook if they had a different experience. But I never had any problems walking around Lockport at night, even when I was just a young kid. My mom never worried about anything happening to me, because nothing ever did. Sure we caused a little trouble in my day, but nothing like what is going on now.

Kids today break into homes with loaded weapons and take hostages for hours. The idea of a good time is to roam the city at night vandalizing cars and destroying private property. I know this sort of stuff has been happening for decades, but it was never at this level. We were never to the point where we felt the need to install cameras on our streets just to try and catch the criminals before they shot someone to death.

Lockport never had a great reputation with others in Western New York. We were always seen as that backwards country town up north. Now people have this impression that Lockport is the Wild West with drugs on every corner and people being shot every night. To be fair, it isn’t that far from being the truth.

So what can we do? Last week, I told you that we the people will have to take a more active role in taking back our city and the only comment I got was from someone talking about district attorneys and a failed legal system. If you are going to tell me that there has always been crime, then I am going to tell you that there has always been a failed legal system. The problem may very well be due, in part, to the inability of our courts to properly distribute justice, but it is also due, in part, to our ability to seemingly turn the other cheek and not take accountability for our own city.

Do you have any idea how many drug halfway houses are in the city of Lockport? When you allow city property owners to do whatever they want just to make a buck, you wind up with a city in trouble.

Lockport needs to be fixed from the inside out. People need to be held accountable for themselves and their actions. If a property is dilapidated, then have it condemned and torn down. Don’t allow it to be rented out at a cut-rate price just because a slumlord wants it that way.

Lockport used to be a proud place. It used to be a place that we all called home. Now there is an element slithering into our city that doesn’t care about our history and doesn’t care about our city. Drug dealers, career criminals, and problems the county and state don’t want to deal with are dragging this city into the very depths of Hell.

I want my children to feel safe when they set up their own home in Lockport. When my boy was very young, I had dreams of him maintaining the family home for many generations to come. Now it is getting to the point where people like me, people who care, have to seriously consider getting out of Lockport to save our families.

It is a decline that makes me sick. What makes it worse is that, instead of getting anything done, all people want to do is argue. We are losing our city, and everyone wants to know what is in it for them. At this pace, there won’t be anything left to divide up.

Nick Oliver is a Niagara County resident with a proud Lockport heritage. His column appears every Wednesday.

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