No Evidence of Increased Crime From Man-Camps
By John Earp
This past Monday, Jal Chief of Police Mauricio Valeriano spoke with The Jal Record concerning questions about a possible increase in incidences of criminal behavior by residents of man-camps and RV parks in Jal. For the past several years, a large number of temporary workers in the oil and gas sector have chosen to live in temporary workforce housing in and around Jal. At the most recent Planning & Zoning Commission mùeeting last week, several permanent Jal residents voiced concern about the safety of their families with the possibility of a new man-camp being built across the street from Jal Lake. Some women said they no longer feel safe walking around the lake as it is, with the Target man-camp which has for several years been directly across Whitworth from the park.
Chief Valeriano said he has observed no uptick in crime related to man-camp residents. To the contrary, he said the man-camps have worked closely with the Jal Police Department, and if there is a problem with any resident, they are evicted, adding, “and probably fired from their job.” Valeriano said he didn’t have analytical data available, but said that by far, Jal Police Department deals with traffic (primarily speeding and rolling through stop signs) related to the oil boom, not crimes as such. He said, “Most of the crimes that have been committed in the last couple years, we’re looking at local people.” He said, “There’s a few percentage of those who have committed crimes, but the majority of them are [just out here to work], and the man-camps do a really good job if they have any issues with them, they’ll kick them out and send them home.”
Valeriano said the stereotyping of man-camps as dangerous to the public is, “Unfortunate, because I actually drove by an Amarillo man-camp between Odessa and Midland, and I thought hey that’s a pretty gool looking man-camp. It looked really nice. There’s nothing that we’ve seen that we can put on a statistic that would say, ‘Hey man, we don’t need one of these. This is detrimental to Jal.’”
Valeriano also addressed whether Jal has a lot of drug problems, saying, “With the amount of people that are in and out of Jal, I would say that that would probably be one of the bigger issues, where we try to combat, but it’s not like you’re seeing like a big city with a big population of homeless people that are doing drugs on the side of the road or anything like that.” He said he thinks that it is probably the case that people’s imaginations are making things bigger than they really are. He said the major things the police department deals with have to do with traffic, speeding through town, trucks driving down residential and other streets marked “No Trucks,” running stop signs, and “that’s what keeps us occupied for most of the day.” He says most of the speeders they deal with are passing through town.
The chief says there are some misconceptions about man-camps. He said, “Target’s been really good man-camp. They’ve worked for us. Tomorrow, for National Night Out, they’re going to cook some food for the event. He said, “They’re really good partners with the police department, that’s for sure. We haven’t had any issues with their staff or residents. It’s been a really good relationship between them and the police department. At first, I was kind of feeling about man-camps, that we’re going to have more crime, and I was wanting for them to have their own security, and they don’t have their own security teams. Whenever they came in we had no issues with them. The managers keep an eye on their camps, and if there’s anything that happens, they always call us and then say, ‘Hey, we’re sending this guy home and we’ve called his company and they’re coming to pick him up.’ We kind of just stand by and it’s really neat to see because they get all their bags and they’re gone that same day and they’re probably fired from whoever they’re working for.”
Regarding safety of children, Valeriano mentioned a class he recently took for training in which he learned that 80% of the time, an abuser or molester is a family member or a friend of the family who has relatively easy access to the child. He says it used to be it was that ‘stranger danger,’ but now it’s most likely to be family members or other close acquaintances
