Warning: ideas mixed with satire follow..... Concerns about downsizing our
police department might very well vanish if we can succeed in downsizing crime
an equal amount. We could take a page out of the GW Bush Administration play
book and redefine a few crimes out of existence, or perhaps we should just
identify ways of marginalizing them to a particular area of the city, like
Powderhorn, Phillips, Central, various North neighborhoods..... oh wait, that's been
done. Okay, how about designation of a non-enforcement zone for some crimes; we
have drug-free zones, how about some free drug zones; take from the dealers
outside the zone and dump the stuff for anybody's use inside -- the Rob the
hood strategy. Gee, perhaps a vice asylum district to go with the adult
entertainment district; all we need is a place where there won't be any NIMBYs or
NIMBYs that could be bought off cheaply, and shazam....the roaches go in, but they
don't come out and cause trouble or else, see? It's like a Code-For thing
where you don't really do anything about the crime unless it spills over into the
wrong parts of town....no wait, we do that or we've done it I think, maybe
starting with Prohibition.
But seriously, 'our cash ain't nothin' but trash' to purloin an old song
lyric. You do the best with what you have on the things that are important.
Money means nothing when you can just focus on getting a job done. For instance,
I think that since we're talking about reducing the size of the force by
attrition in Chief McManus's five year plan, we should concentrate on becoming lean
and mean. To illustrate this, take a cop's cop like John Delmonico -- Don't
you think this man could stand to lose some weight? I don't mean to pick on
Delmonico, but I don't know the names of the others I've seen; this should help
on the health premiums. Of course as earlier posts attest, our police do a fine
job with what they've got. So let's go somewheres else with this.
A few years back, Hennepin County released a big thick report, written by
a host of mostly upper middle class folks of N. European extraction for the
most part with input from other folks, called the African American Men Project.
Skim of the rich mumbo-jumbo and get to the meat of this report that
low-lifes like me can understand: we gotta do some stuff a little differently than
we've been doing it. But aside from a few pilot projects here and there that now
probably are running out of dough, not many strategies suggested by this work
have been implemented and it gathers dust on shelves of various city and
county folks. The authors say it is relavant to other ethnic groups, and I believe
it is true. (There is much talk about races of human beings that I believe to
be an human artifice with no basis in biology; but we won't get into that in
this treatment.).
As a former treasurer (not a great one) of a non-profit organization (not
a bad one), I approach these sorts of problems based on mission. If it ain't
our mission, we shouldn't spend our money on it. This could go for unfunded
federal mandates or those that require a greater local investment than is
justified by our mission (for a city, read "comprehesive plan" or "charter" or
whatever), i.e., if somebody outside your organization wants you to spend money on
stuff that has nothing to do with your mission, you tell them to get lost. But
when your state leader just say "yes" to the feds, even though you say "no"
on the local level -- well, that is just an ugly situation isn't it. It is the
kind of situation you try to rectify in November for the most part.
Bill Kahn
Prospect Perq; errr Park, yes Prospect Park
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