The city has a $19 million budget surplus, and not a plug nickel will go towards staffing or supporting the police department... or for that matter anything that could even vaguely be construed as helpful (other than maybe the 3% allotted to help feed the homeless)
Instead of ---> It's
Picking up litter --> billboards against litter
Alleviating pain --> painfully shiteous public art
Education for our kids --> a fountain with "five rows of jets and lights" for kids to run through
Attempting to determine how more than 1,000+ potential crime victims died --> erecting statue "honoring" long-dead mayor
If you feel the need to complain to your city councilperson about this obscene waste of your money, you can find out who they are at this site.
12 comments:
I'm going to go out on a limb here and predict that even after the Park Heights Master Plan is completed, that neighborhood will still be a shithole. Unless you clean up the human garbage then other revitalization is pointless.
But if you got rid of the human garbage in Baltimore City, how could we ever retain the human garbage sitting on the City Counc?.... Oops.
On another note, the SA's office shows yet another manifestation of the police manpower shortage... criminal prosecutions dropped in Circuit Court.
Apparently the State's Attorney's office spent only $34,000 on overtime last year. Of course they also suck at prosecuting criminals, so I'm not sure how much of an accomplishment that is.
Councilman Harris says, "That's (police overtime) $19.8 million that could have gone toward some rec program or some after-school programs."
Uh, rec programs? How about if we use some of that unbudgeted overtime money to hire more police and make across-the-board salary adjustments in order to hire and retain good cops, thus reducing the need for existing officers to work overtime?
I know, that's just crazy talk.
so in that article about the pastor calling for a war on the stop snitching mentality (which is what? the second or third article in as many days on that subject with no real new information?) they say there have been 110 murders this year. i wonder if #110 is the guy that got hit by the van or just someone who they didn't bother reporting anything about?
ppatin - you seemed to have missed the "Prosecutors are not eligible for overtime pay" part of the story.
Here's why our city is abysmal - the politicians would rather do things to pat themselves on the back than actually do really important things.
Kick all of the bums out of office and replace them with chimps on roller skates... I imagine they could not do any worse...
"ppatin - you seemed to have missed the "Prosecutors are not eligible for overtime pay" part of the story."
I did read it, and that was part of the reason I thought it was silly that Pat Jessamy was acting as if not spending a lot of money on OT was an accomplishment.
Good Lord, they are trying to institute the "Broken Window theory", which is explained in detail in the book, "The tipping Point". The book credits NYC's decline in crime as people starting to clean up subways, boarded up homes and other garbage around ailing neighborhoods.
On the same subject, Freakonomics simply states that while cleaning up neighborhoods of eyesores can increase the positive mentality of some citizens, NYC's crime reduction plan was due to a majority of funding going into an ailing and corrupt police department. They modernized the NYPD, added more honest cops and fully prosecuted the bad guys. Shazam! crime started failing.
It begs the question: The answer to Baltimore's crime problem is simple and obvious; so why isn't the mayor making that call? why aren't they doing anything? What does she have to gain with crime being the way it is?
When that question is answered then we can start fighting harder and making the necessary changes to the city.
It's about her support base. How many of her voters are anti-crime and how many have criminal nephews and grandchildren. Anti-crime is a bad platform given this city's population of hoodlums and their relatives. A municipal government which is obliged to a hoodlum constituency has a conflict of interest in exercising law enforcement powers with respect to the basic criminal statute enacted in Annapolis.
Through local laxity we are denied the protections of law to which all Marylanders are supposed to be entitled. The power to police should be reassigned to another entity until the local government becomes unconflicted, which occurs principally through the incarceration of their problem constituency.
That's the real tipping point.
(BTW, the book Tipping Point does a poor job of explaining Broken Windows, which is really a paper by Kelling & Wilson and pertains to the policing of criminal misconduct, not to windows, or bricks, or garbage.) Those things are just a favorite excuse of politicians who don't want to have to lock up their supporters' nephews.
And yes, my puke bucket runneth over, kinda like the idiotic discretionary spending.
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