That’s a paraphrase of what Wilmington’s Public Safety Liaison, Mr. Douglas Iardella, told one of the attendees of tonite’s Wilmington Public Safety Strategies Commission. This, unfortunately, is the only thing that can explain the Administration’s continued and obvious delay in talking about implementing the recommendations of the Commission’s report. Tonight’s meeting was expected to feature Chief Bobby Cummings discussing the report’s recommendations that the WPD would implement and discuss the path forward. Many community members came out (again) to be a part of the discussion and several of Wilmington’s GA delegation came as well.
Instead of hearing from the Chief, we heard from Iardella, who is a consultant to the Mayor and also on the WPD at the time the Mayor was. Few people know what Iardella does at the City, besides show up at meetings, but he is paid a pretty penny (in addition to his pension, of course!) to do it. This time, Iardella was sent out to disresepect the citizens of Wilmington on behalf of the Mayor — instead of starting the discussion of how to move the WPD forward, he came to push forward the story that the WPD has already been working on these ideas, well before there was a WPSSC. According to Iardella, they’ve been working on most of these ideas since October via the Violence Reduction Network program that Wilmington was named to. And they’ll be ready to talk about the work that they’ve done via the VRN next week — he didn’t know what day, what time, whether it would be a press release or a press conference or whether residents would have a chance to engage in a dialog about it with the City.
And that was pretty much it. Community members from all over the City gave up their evenings to get no briefing from the Chief (the consultant Iardella *actually* spoke for the Wilmington Chief of Police). This was especially distressing as many of us knew that there were going to be big changes in our community policing unit — as in officers being transferred and reassigned in favor of bringing in new people. Not being able to contextualize of explain that was a mistake by the Chief and Iardella. Not showing up prepared to have a robust discussion on these issues (how many more people were shot over the Memorial Day weekend?), but trying to vamp their way into next week was a mistake. But telling someone that the Administration can’t have the Commission get credit for these ideas? That’s just a tragedy.
No one from the Commission, from the consultant group or from the community showed up to do this work with the idea of getting credit for ANYTHING. We all showed up to work on ways to make Wilmington safer and the WPD more effective. It is beyond despicable that the Williams Administration ran right by improved safety and a police department that was better managed to trying to figure out how the Commission can be deprived of credit for the thing. They also ran right by the real bloodshed in the streets and the real families that are devastated by this violence in their quest to make sure the Commission gets no credit for these recommendations. The Williams Administration ran right by the citizens and those who work in the City who have real concerns about their safety here in order to focus on who gets credit for this.
The only people who are interested in credit for these ideas are the people who are trying to bamboozle you into thinking that Operation Disrupt is working. They probably need all of the time they are taking to respond to actually try to put together a VRN paper trail to say that “they did too do their homework!” Because if they were getting so much from the VRN, Mayor Williams would have said that when he first welcomed the Commission. He would have taken the chance then to say that this tool was working for them. Certainly the consultants would have seen some of this workproduct and would have included it in the report — rather than indicating where VRN resources could help.
Credit is what motivates this Administration — not your safety, not good custodianship of your tax dollars, not a better functioning WPD. Think about that the next time you read of a shooting in Wilmington. And be sure to give the Mayor credit for each one of them.
In the meantime, it is time to energize the Wilmington delegation to hold some portion of Wilmington’s funding from Dover to incentivize Mayor Williams to join the reality based community and dump this narcissistic credit business. If you are a constituent of Senator Bob Marshall or Senator Harris McDowell, it is time they heard from you. Wilmington’s City Council couldn’t get any accountability from the Williams Administration — time for Wilmington’s delegation to the GA to get it done.