Phoning It In

UPDATED – Below

Faced with another deadly spike in the city’s crime rate this month, the Current Occupant of the Trenton Mayor’s Office responded yesterday by boldly… dusting off a press release from two months ago. Now the CO is “Fed Up!” In October, he told us that “Enough is Enough!” Next month, will he tell criminals “Get Off My Lawn”?

Apart from the exclamation points, both press releases feature the same six emergency contact phone numbers and email addresses for citizens despairing of conditions in the city to use to call problems in.

Meantime, the CO will have us believe  that he and his Administration have “made concerted efforts to reduce crime: everything [my emphasis – KM]from hiring additional police officers to transferring officers with desk jobs to our patrol bureau.”

Umm, that’s not quite everything. Those are the ONLY things he’s done. The “additional officers” he boasts of really just replaced people who’ve retired over the last few years. And the transfer of desk officers has resulted in only two additional people to patrol. Two. And he calls that “everything.”

What an asshole.

In his weekly “Ask the Brick Wall” meeting the other day, he promised that he would announce a sweeping new plan, next week. I hear that its main effort will involve the partial re-opening some or all of the police sub-stations in the Wards, erected at great expense during the Palmer/Santiago era, and closed during the reign of the CO.

If that’s all we get, I say Big F-ing Deal!

People are dying at an increasing pace in this town, and those doing the killing don’t seem to be intimidated or deterred in their actions. All neighborhoods at all times of day and night are liable to see acts of mayhem and violence break out, and more blood on the streets.

Some of City Council’s members have scheduled a press conference today. It is to be hoped that whatever they have to say will feature phrases like “We announce the following actions,” “Beginning today,” “We offer more than phone numbers to you,” and the like.

The CO is in an impossible position. He has to rail against a criminal element that allegedly includes him, members of his family, and many of his close associates. It’s hard to crack down on others, and not recognize that the guy staring at you in the  mirror also deserves to go down. Hard.

So, perhaps it’s not surprising that he reacts by choosing to give up on one of his most important responsibilities: that of protecting the people he was elected to serve. As a result, he is once again phoning it in by recycling a failed message from two months ago, asking us to respond to this crisis in public safety by phoning it in ourselves.

UPDATE

At approximately 11:30 this morning – right before the scheduled Noon City Council press conference. Hmmm… – the CO released a copy of a letter he has sent to Governor Christie asking for two immediate measures from the State to assist the City in its public safety efforts.

The first request is for the assignment of a battalion (I don’t know how many that is) of State Police to work with the Trenton PD. In true CO-style, he mixes his message. First, he asks that the assignment be “permanent,” then he says in the same paragraph that the assignment would be “up to six months or more.”

Well, which is it? Permanent, or temporary?

Second, he asks for “additional public safety aid above and beyond any transitional aid allotment, ” sufficient to hire “60 to 75” additional police officers for the Patrol Bureau.

I guess he expects the Governor to pull out his calculator and figure how much that would be, because the CO makes no dollar request.

The sloppiness of this note gives me the feeling that this was a last-minute, hastily-written attempt to steal attention away from the Council presser at Noon. Pathetic.

What an asshole.