My Athens

Use Flower Power to Fight Burglaries

As part of its efforts to fight burglaries, Athens-Clarke Co. Police Department might want to consider encouraging residents to plant lots of flowers in the hardest hit neighborhoods.

According to public safety officials in at least one city, planting flowers in residential neighborhoods seems to deter burglaries. Here’s the logic: Planting flowers in front of homes gets people outside to take care of the plants, and while they’re out and about they can see who else is out and about. More eyes on the street = less crime.

Supposedly, Operation Flower in Suginami, a district of Tokyo, helped reduce break-ins by 80 percent over six years.

Planting flowers was only part of a multi-part effort that also included volunteer patrols and security cameras, so it’s not clear how much crime fighting power flowers actually have.

Maybe here in Athens vegetable gardens would work better than flower beds at getting people out and training more eyes on the street.

Still, the general idea of enhancing the natural attentiveness of local residents to deter crime is a promising one. Consider flower planting as a way of adding some pleasure and beauty to the chore of the neighborhood watch.

Looked at this way, the idea of crime-fighting flowers doesn’t sound as silly.

First Impressions

Here’s a small collection of my first impressions of Athens, Ga., my new hometown since May 2008. I collect these jottings I made earlier now—while they’re relatively fresh—mainly because I’m interested to see how my thinking about the city will change over time. They’re not listed in any particular order. In the service of accurately recording them, any contradictions, incoherencies and superficialities have been left intact.

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Exuberant, subversive vegetation. Front yard gardens invade and colonize swaths of sidewalk surface. Tree roots attack from below. If people suddenly vanished from here, the plants would overthrow the pavement within a month.

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Pockmarked by poverty. Public housing projects here, there, everywhere.

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At night, there’s a casual romance to the place. You see lots of couples strolling together. Strings of lights sparkle from many porches. There’s almost always music floating in the air from somewhere.

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Two varieties of nonchalance are present here. 1. A pleasant informality perked with attentiveness and gently constrained by tact and patience. 2. A self-consciously cavalier attitude about promptness mixed with a distaste for precision.

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You can apparently keep discovering yet another really good place to eat here.

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The music of Athens itself: metallic drone of the cicadas, rumble of trains, almost inaudible trumpets of the Naval Supply Corps School, bursts of dogs barking, ambushes of party noises.

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Rusty water towers. Steaming ravines choked with kudzu. Lines of tall, fat cumulus clouds moving slowly on the horizon. Reclining cats, panting.

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A core of charm surrounded by yuck.

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Blacks and whites live in closer proximity here than in some other places I’ve lived. Yet, even more so than other places, the two communities seem to live parallel—not intersecting—lives in the same space. Awkward.

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Smart mayor. Helpful city employees. Citizens responded quickly, effectively to drought. Intelligent coverage of local issues, especially in Flagpole.

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