This was a deadly weekend for the City of Wilmington, with 4 shooting incidents in about 24 hours. Mayor Dennis Williams did not return Adam Taylor’s calls for his article this weekend, but one of the WPD’s PIOs spoke to WDEL this AM on the subject:
Public Information Officer Mark Ivey says police are limited as to what they can do to curb crime. He points to a vicious circle that keeps many of the same criminals working their way through the system.
Did you see what he did there? Mayor Williams promised marked improvement in the City’s rates of violence in 6 months, focusing largely on the WPD, its deployment and resources. Now that we are close to that 6 month milestone, it looks like we begin the effort to back away from that promise. Still, if you have spent any time at community meetings during the violent periods in Wilmington, you will recognize that line of reasoning. Chief Szczerba had his management roll out to community meetings armed with statistics showing the number of arrests made by the WPD for a period, noting that *they* were arresting people as fast as they could. It was the AG’s office and the Judges that kept turning them loose as fast as they went in. The thing is, that this really is part of the problem, and Cris Barrish’s excellent special report on how easy it is to get back on the street after being arrested for fairly serious crimes shows a part of it. But it is intriguing to watch how fast they’ve backed off of the tough guy belligerence that was going to fix it all. They aren’t helping themselves by reorganizing to be utterly reactive rather than proactive to issues, and cutting themselves off from the kind of community partnerships that are supposed to help them do their work. Too bad.
This amazes me — retired Justice Sandra Day-O’Connor tells the Chicago Tribune editorial board that Bush v. Gore may have been a mistake:
Looking back, O’Connor said, she isn’t sure the high court should have taken the case.
“It took the case and decided it at a time when it was still a big election issue,” O’Connor said during a talk Friday with the Tribune editorial board. “Maybe the court should have said, ‘We’re not going to take it, goodbye.'”
The case, she said, “stirred up the public” and “gave the court a less-than-perfect reputation.”
“Obviously the court did reach a decision and thought it had to reach a decision,” she said. “It turned out the election authorities in Florida hadn’t done a real good job there and kind of messed it up. And probably the Supreme Court added to the problem at the end of the day.”
Well, hello.
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