The
oil boom in Western North Dakota and Eastern Montana that overlay the Bakken
Shale field has brought riches and a huge population boom to a region on the edge
of the empire that was worried about losing all of its people not a few years
ago. Now there are millions of dollars
coming into landowners, $20 per hour to fast food workers, and $50,000 to gas
station attendants. The wages come because anyone who can work in the oil fields
or related enterprises can make double that.
And they have money to spend.
When there is a huge population boom and huge money boom, a few things
inevitably follow: drugs and violent crime.
The New York Times has a long report on the crime increase in the area. Beyond the raw numbers that come with a population increase, there is the change in culture. As reported by the Times:
While
the raw numbers of murders and rapes remain low, every few months seem to bring
an act of violence that flares like a gas flame on the dark prairie, shaking a
community and underscoring how much life here is changing.
In Dickinson, it was the rape of an
83-year-old woman, who the police say was attacked inside her home by a
24-year-old man who had come to town looking for work. In Culbertson, Mont., it
was a man who was beaten with brass knuckles by a group of drug dealers and
left for dead along the side of a road. In Sidney, it was the murder in January
2012 of Sherry Arnold, the 43-year-old schoolteacher abducted during her Sunday
morning jog.
Prosecutors
also talk about the increase of drug dealers and Mexican cartels that have come
into the area: Mexican cartels and regional methamphetamine
and heroin traffickers have proliferated, hoping to tap the same sources of
wealth that have turned farmers into millionaires and shaved unemployment rates
to as low as 0.7 percent.
“It’s following the
money,” said Michael W. Cotter, the United States attorney for Montana. “I hate
to call the cartels entrepreneurs, but they’re in the business to make money.
There’s a lot of money flying around that part of Montana and North Dakota.”
The oil is a blessing and a curse. Drugs and violence weren’t absent from North
Dakota and Montana. The numbers and the money,
though, which bring the good of jobs bring vice as well. As the oil region expands, the biggest
trouble may be attracting and paying police officers if the pay in the oil
fields keeps rising. The oil money,
which comes so fast goes so quickly do.
And the things that it gets spent on by a minority of the workers bring
most of the vice.
Article and picture: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/01/us/as-oil-floods-plains-towns-crime-pours-in.html?_r=2&
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