It's after 3 am, and I'd planned to be asleep by now. The
party in front of my house is just breaking up. For the last hour
several carloads of drunken young men have been smoking dope, blaring
"music", and racing engines in front of my home.
Meanwhile, next door to the recently busted
crack/prostitution house a house size whole has appeared in the
ground. Into it will be plopped a quick and dirty structure, to be
sold to unsuspecting new arrivals for an exorbitant price. Within a
few months a fence will go up and bars and burglar alarms will appear
on the windows. The new owners will bail as soon as possible, and
after a decade or so and a lot of subsidies the property will go tax
forfeit again.
3:35 am... MPD channel 2 reports 2 vehicles looking like some
of the "partyers" involved in an incident. No surprise, the new
Mustang raced away, clearly never stopped for the signs up the
street. The other vehicle is a new Tahoe. So much for another
listmembers blaming crime solely on poverty...
About now someone will chime in "why didn't I call 911?".
This is all misdemeanor stuff, as I didn't see any of the telltale
pyrotechnics of crack ignition. I wish our police force could crack
down on livability crimes like New York City did... they have twice
the per capita police force we have though. We at least need to get
the most out of the tiny force we have. Tallying the unit numbers
heard on MPD radio, It appears that even on the a weekend evening
there are only aboout 15 patrol cars working in the 4th (Northside)
precinct. Most of these are one person cars, so we have maybe 20
officers on the street. Multiply that by 5 precincts and we have
maybe 100 officers of an 800 some officer force on the street at most.
Then their are the "details". Last weekend fire and ambulance
responded to a "difficulty breathing" call up the street. They then
waited for a good part of an hour for a squad to arrive so they could
safely tend to the injured. That same weekend I noted several squads
parked behind the convention center, "protecting" the chiefs of
police who weren't even their at the time from some "threat" that
never materialized.
The prognosis: Anybody here been to the burnt out inner city
neighborhoods of Gary, Detroit, Philly, etc.? That's where we're
headed. We have a narrow window of opportunity to save this city...
and we're missing it.
trying to sleep in Hawthorne,
Dyna Sluyter
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