The Google sometimes fails us

Last week police arrested two people in south Huntsville on drug and weapons charges:

Michael Jude and Deja Moore were being held Wednesday night on $759,000 bond. They’re each charged with trafficking cocaine, possession of a controlled substance and second-degree possession of marijuana.

The two were arrested on Reaches Place off Benaroya Lane near Byrd Spring Road in south Huntsville. On Tuesday night, Madison-Morgan County STAC agents moved in after they watched a man carry automatic weapons, crack cocaine, pistols and other drugs to a car in front of the home. With warrants in hand, they took him down.

The police say the home had been under surveillance for months.

I subsequently have received a couple of emails from people alerting me that Reaches Place is actually Stone Manor (the apartment complex recently purchased by the HHA).  If I’ve received a couple of emails then there must be quite a few to that effect circling around.  A quick search of Google Maps indicates that Reaches Place and Stone Manor are one and the same.  The obvious conclusion is that the HHA has brought crime into the area.  One tiny problem with that, though.  Reaches Place is actually one block north of Stone Manor.  Mapquest has the correct location, which I drove past to verify.

There are a few take aways…

Number one: don’t rely solely on Google.  It is wrong once in a while.

This incident is a reminder of how raw the HHA wound is among south Huntsville residents.  They are hyper-vigilant right now.  People will seek out connections between anything negative in the area and the HHA.  Some connections will be real, others believable, but imagined.  If test scores in effected schools go down…  Watch out.

When I responded to the first emailer I noted how shortly after the HHA’s purchase of Stone Manor was made public there was an attempt to downplay the fear of violence following the projects by claiming that parts of the Chaffee area actually had more felony arrests than the area where the projects were previously located.  As I understand it, though, the police never made their crime database available so that it could be independently verified that the data was not cherry picked to spin the desired narrative.  I joked in my email response that maybe south Huntsville residents should change their anti-HHA rhetoric and argue that the HHA is putting all those poor, unfortunate folks at risk by moving them into a high crime war zone!

It is also worth noting that news stories involving drugs and guns make headlines when they happen in “nice” neighborhoods for the very fact that they are rare.  Those same stories generate a collective yawn when they occur in or around the projects.  They are simply too numerous to be shocked when one reads about them.