Re: Violent crime a real concern (Our View, Jan. 30)
Langford has enough problems trying to recover from the “hick Langford” reputation that Mayor Stew Young and his council have been fighting against for years.
We are finally getting a good reputation as a family friendly city. This editorial was clearly designed to try and destroy that by making Langford out to be “scary and dangerous,” because some criminals from Victoria were passing through and happened to stop in Langford to commit their crime.
I also think it is incredibly important to make a note of where the criminals are from simply because it means that we don’t have the criminal group living in Langford where the crimes can be repeated regularly but that they just happened to be passing through and it could easily have stopped in Victoria, Saanich, or View Royal.
We have lived in Esquimalt with the crimes in the Head Street area; Victoria city, where drug party boarding houses are common and the dealers are dealing on the streets, and Saanich, where we lived off Cloverdale Avenue near an infamous drug house that has since been torn down.
Langford has been the first safe city where I feel OK letting my kids play in the yard because there are not an abundance of drug houses like there are in Victoria.
I do not think that it is fair to try and destroy Langford’s family friendly reputation because of two non-related incidents involving criminals from outside of Langford.
Lara Allsop
Langford