The Hard Streets of Polk County

You hear a lot of stories of mass murder coming from a place you wouldn’t expect: Polk County. My first exposure to this place was a cute 22-year-old gay guy who lived next door to me in Miami. He grew up in Lakeland, where his existence was so clean that he used the term “garage feet” for anyone whose feet were dirty. The homogeneous housing developments were so pristine, the only place a child could get dirt on his bare feet was if he walked through a suburban garage.

One day I heard an extraordinary shrieking of distress. I walked to the far side of his house, and saw a hawk had eaten a chicken. I was looking in awe at the two chicken legs that remained, when the cute gay guy came out. He believed I was snooping around his house. He threatened me in a tone of violence that I had never heard from anyone else in Miami.

More recently in 2020, there was the mass murder of three people in Frostproof who had gone fishing. According to Sheriff Judd, Damion Tillman, 23, Brandon Rollins, 27, and Keven Springfield, 30, were found beaten and shot. Sheriff Judd said a lone maniac did it, Tony Wiggins. But to me it sounded like an outnumbered fight that included the victim’s father, and the guy who was outnumbered came out on top.

Then in 2021, four people were killed including a baby during a shooting rampage in Lakeland, by a guy named Bryan Riley. But the one I meant to say was in 2021, Shaun Runyon beat three people to death in Davenport with a baseball bat. In 2022 Samuel Doolin, the cousin of a “most wanted” January 6th fugitive, was arrested in Lakeland with a truck full of illegal machine guns.

Now in 2023 in Winter Haven, Alex Greene was shot to death after carjacking an old lady and trying to run over a cop, while fleeing on a burglary warrant. Greene was a suspect in the recent mass shooting of 11 people in Lakeland, possibly over marijuana. And of course we have the recurring stories out of Lakeland of police beating people, and then getting caught on doorbell cameras or something.

To save you looking it up yourself, what these guys have in common is they are all white guys. These are not crazy black people who were raised in the ‘hood, and told their whole life that the world is out to get them. They grew up in what Sheriff Judd characterizes as an idyllic suburb, a haven that Judd himself takes credit for cultivating, free from the crime and blight of those other places where left-wing district attorneys let criminals off with a slap on the wrist.

It is a fair question to wonder what is going on here? Did Sheriff Judd somehow create these people? Were these people already here and Sheriff Judd is the symptom? It is fair to speculate that somehow Judd himself, with his constant media circuses telling people they are living in a world of violence, a war zone, has misled these young men about the world they are living in. Judd is a gangsta rapper, but with no cars or ho’s just violence.

If you spend every week like Grady Judd, telling young people that the streets are full of violence where the bad people have to be shot, perhaps they will believe it. The streets of Polk County should not be hard. But Sheriff Judd has convinced people they are. And perhaps these young men have grown up accordingly, in a place that should not have been hard, but was made so by Sheriff Judd for his own self aggrandizement.