On 7/17/05 6:42 PM, "Barbara Lickness" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Chris, you make these strong statements about Peter McLaughlin from your > viewpoint as a resident of the Fulton neighborhood. It has never been a > bastion of crime and thanks to the cities policy of concentration it never > will. You sleep gently at night without fear that bullets will fly through > your windows and someone with a gun will kick down your door. I wish I could > say the same. I wish the people in Jordan and Hawthorne and East or Midtown > Phillips could say the same. Let's not get sidetracked on what Chris Johnson's point was, which is that McLaughlin resorts to misleading accusations and disingenuous use of crime and budget statistics, most recently in his Star Tribune opinion piece. And Chris Johnson backed that point up a heck of a lot better than McLaughlin has ever backed up any of his accusations about Mayor Rybak. When McLaughlin accused Mayor Rybak of favoring his own office's budget over hiring more police, Chris Johnson pointed out the following facts that refute that accusation: 1. The mayor's office budget is so small that 12.2 percent would not hire 2 police officers. 2. The 12.2% increase is primarily the result of reallocation of citywide BIS and benefits administration charges, 3. and is spread out over a staff of 11, which is smaller than the staff has been historically. 4. It includes only a 0.8% increase in salaries and wages, compared to 2% for police department negotiated salaries. 5. Moreover, it was completely in line with the 5-year budget plans adopted by the City Council, 6. and contains no changes recommended by the Mayor. And Chris goes on to refute other misleading charges from McLaughlin: "And statements like this one: "Responding to the Minneapolis crime wave won't be easy after almost four years of cutbacks..." Reading Repya's article and Gambill's post makes it clear that over the past 4 years crime is down and yet McLaughlin calls it a "crime wave." He insinuates that the cutbacks are the Mayor's fault, rather than a combination of state-level cuts and credit-card free spending by McLaughlin's supporters and friends in the previous administration of this city. Selectively pulling a few crime numbers which are up in a 4-month period this year compared to a 4-month period last year is such an egregious misuse -- of something that is nothing more than a bump of statistical insignificance at this point -- that such reasoning in a college statistics class would earn the student an F." Chris then goes on to editorialize a bit and I'd have to say I agree with every word he said. "McLaughlin's campaigning has been replete with these kinds of smearing attacks. We as a city don't have time for this kind of nonsense. We have problems to solve and we need to do it cooperatively. The more I hear from McLaughlin, the less I like him. He has become the poster child for "negative campaigning" and it has become to sound like so much whining. What's next? Push polls?" I've started talking about the mayoral campaign with my grandmother who lives in Holland neighborhood. My grandfather was a Minneapolis firefighter until retiring shortly after I was born and and so my grandmother became a pensioner when he passed on in 1988. So my grandmother has been hearing from the union and other pensioners about McLaughlin and she told me despite what they were telling her, there's no way she's voting for him. She said based on what she's seen from him in the papers and when she's watched him on Channel 7, he's too mean and too negative for her to support. She said the picture he paints of the city doesn't agree with what she sees going on around her and I agree with her. Interestingly, it seems like Mayor Rybak's biggest detractors in this forum seem to be from those "impacted" neighborhoods that are getting more help through the STOP program that Rybak and Chief McManus started, at the expense of neighborhoods like Chris's or mine. Personally, I was glad to see the STOP program get started. I've been saying in this forum for a few years now that it didn't make sense to have cops sitting around in my neighborhood when they could be working in areas that needed them more like Jordan or Whittier. And now, thanks to Senator Pogemiller and others in our legislative delegation listening to Mayor Rybak and the mayors of other cities who testified on the need for more LGA funds, we have money to hire more than enough cops to replenish the neighborhood beats while still keeping the STOP program in place to target the areas where our crime problems are the worst. So much for the notion that Mayor Rybak doesn't care about crime. 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