A whack with a wooden baseball bat twice to the head of a 52-year-old woman then slamming her  face three times into the hood of a 1980 Chevy Nova is not a pretty sight.
It is something you do not want to have to ever see, especially if it is your mother who was the victim.
The man welding the bat was what criminologists call a career criminal. His accomplice was what social scientists call a rehabilitated drug user.
 The attack on a late July night came as my mother was exiting a laundromat in downtown Lincoln. Her assailants mistook her for the owner of the adjacent Lupita’s Mexican restaurant leaving with the bank deposit.
As the career criminal took his first swing at my mother’s head as if it were a piñata, the rehabilitated drug user yelled out to his partner that he was attacking the wrong woman. When the career criminal shoved my mom forward, grabbed the back of her head, and slammed it twice into the hood of her car the rehabilitated drug user tried to physically pull him off.
The career criminal who had previously served time twice for robbing and physically attacking victims in Utah and California got three years. The rehabilitated drug user got seven years. The career criminal had the better lawyer.
My mother got a fractured skull, a broken jaw, almost all of her teeth knocked out and severe daily sinus headaches for the remaining 32 years of her life.
She refused to let the attack change her life. She refused to live in fear. Much to the chagrin of her three sons and daughter she continued to run errands by herself late at night. Mom’s only concession was to keep the front door locked — something that wasn’t a common practice back in the 1980s when Lincoln was a community of 3,600 residents.
In time, we got her point. Fear is worse than the reality.
The unpleasant trip down memory lane was prompted by statistics that show a bump in Manteca crime in raw numbers while the overall 10-year trend of crimes per 1,000 residents is downward. The jump in numbers will trigger the usual Greek chorus that “Manteca is a crime ridden dump” uttered by malcontents that would view the Rapture as a downer.
The hard, cold numbers don’t lie. Manteca crime is dropping in relation to population. You are significantly less likely to be a victim of a crime today in Manteca than you were 10 years ago.
Odds are pretty low of you being a victim of a random property crime in Manteca. The odds of you being a victim of random violence, though, is much, much lower unless you live in a gang-riddled, drug-laden neighborhood.
The overwhelming victims of violent crimes are gang members, wannabe gang members, drug users, and those in an abusive relationship.
We should not rejoice in the fact there were “only” 800 burglaries and “only” 2,004 felonies committed last year in Manteca. But we can ill afford to lose our heads. Some fear is healthy but to not keep it in check not only paralyzes you but also blinds you leading you to bad decisions based on paranoia and not facts.
It has been clear for a long time that roughly 90 percent of the crimes are committed by 10 percent of the criminals. This was the rationale behind Three Strikes. If you take career criminals off the street, crime goes down.
Crime in California has been dropping since Three Strikes was put into effect. There are other factors at work as well. We are about to find out whether the governor’s decision to meet federal mandates about prison overcrowding by releasing tens of thousands of “non-violent”  felons of which many were put away under Third Strike sentencing laws spiked crime. The first full-year of the impact of such releases would have been recorded in 2015 crime rates. If national stats for cities based on per 1,000 residents expected in September show that California cities increased while much if the rest of the nation declined when it comes to crime rates, we will have the answer.
As for drug rehabilitation, there is a better way. It’s called saying no to drugs.
Anyone who doesn’t believe drugs — including alcohol — can’t have deadly consequences for innocent victims have never heard of drug-induced crimes from assault and rape to murder or the result of excessive alcohol consumption leading to DUI fatalities and violent assaults.
It is why the best course for a safer Manteca tomorrow is not in a significant expansion of the police force but a doubling down on prevention on everything from education and youth programs to mentoring.

This column is the opinion of executive editor, Dennis Wyatt, and does not necessarily represent the opinion of The Bulletin or Morris Newspaper Corp. of CA.  He can be contacted at dwyatt@mantecabulletin.com or 209.249.3519.