How hard can it be to write newspaper columns, when the local mayor congratulates himself for a drop in “serious crime,” announces fancy, new crime-fighting objectives for the new year — and then gets himself arrested on bribery/corruption-related charges?
Thank you, Mayor Eddie.
Barely had Hartford’s mayor cleared his throat about crime in general and his apparent crime in particular, when the mayor of Baltimore was indicted on 12 counts of theft and perjury and embarrassment — right after she was done congratulating herself on a drop in city crime. They must learn this stuff at some sort of workshop for mayors.
In truth, making fun of Hartford Mayor Eddie Perez for being one of his own crime statistics is sort of like shooting fish in a barrel — and the last thing the city needs is another shooting. More instructive is a look at Mayor Eddie’s analysis of crime in the city.
Boondoggle Mush
At the top of the crime-fighting agenda, as announced by the mayor in January, will be to work with Bridgeport and New Haven to sneak through the legislature a three-year, $15 million boondoggle of a “community policing” thing, all larded up with “mentoring” programs and after-school programs and job-training programs and, oh, sure, a few more personable cops on the street to make nice with the “community.”
For the most part, programs such as these are job-creating mush for your pals. Whether they have any impact at all on crime rates is open to question, but they are just fine at creating make-work for “community leaders” without much in the way of employment credentials.
Last month, one of the “anti-gang intervention workers” in Los Angeles was arrested on charges related to a beating and jewelry robbery. At least, he apparently knows of what he preaches.
In Boston, the city is about to be blessed with a squadron of “violence interrupters,” who will be paid to make nice with the gangs and transform gang members into actuaries or columnists or something else harmless and safe.
At the heart of all this semi-nonsense is the fervent hope that there is some successful crime-fighting technique less jarring than sending armies of law enforcement types into “bad” neighborhoods to arrest every creepy-looking guy in sight.
Hartford occasionally brings in grouchy state cops to perform this function, but it is thought to be unlovely — not a good example of “community policing.” In New Jersey late last year, state cops and the attorney general ran amok through the state, arresting almost 2,000 suspected gang members, including 29 bad guys wanted on murder charges.
The unspoken reality, as confirmed last month in a study released by Northeastern University, is that black teens are killing each other with increased enthusiasm — quite aside from whether overall crime statistics are going up or down.
That, in some measure, is why the dreamy, three-city “Community-Oriented Policing Services” sounds more like a new social service agency than an anti-crime initiative. Community leaders know which segments of the population to target in efforts to reduce the urban body count, but they are reluctant to talk about it in terms of race or culture or socioeconomic status.
The best of Mayor Eddie’s crime-prevention wish list is cooperation with the state to receive a timely, accurate report on when and where creatures on probation or parole are released back into their unhappy neighborhoods.
Crime and crime prevention and the variables that make the research such a mess are a reality that won’t go away, that won’t be clarified by pretty speeches. As the brilliant politician-scholar U.S. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan put it, “Nobody knows a damn thing about crime.”
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.