At the end of the legislative session last Thursday, the GA took back $1.5 million it was holding at the behest of AG Matt Denn to finance more WPD foot patrols in hot spots in Wilmington. AG Denn helped the City to fund foot patrols last spring and then the JFC met in a special session to allocate more funds this time for both Wilmington and Dover. The additional $1.5M would have paid for 20 weeks of foot patrols and other overtime and would have added in $75K for crime analysis of hot spots by the Delaware State Police. The legislators conditioned Wilmington’s award to the city providing some data on current WPD deployments and it would require that the city meet with the WPPSC consultants again so an assessment could be made of the City’s progress in implementing the recommendations of the commission. As the JFC voted on the plan, they also :
voted on a motion Wednesday that said budget lawmakers will later determine whether the committee “should recommend to the full General Assembly any changes to the City of Wilmington’s unilateral authority to oversee police operations within the City of Wilmington or such other measures as it deems appropriate.”
A reminder on the background here — the City just blew past 500 shootings on Mayor Williams’ watch, we’ve gotten the label (and TV show), “Murdertown” and the much-vaunted cure for violence the Mayor sais he had when he campaigned has yet to materialize. Residents and businesspeople in Wilmington have been pressuring everyone they can — the Governor, the Wilmington delegation, the Congressional delegation for some action to make Delaware’s biggest city more stable. And all of that pressure comes because neither Williams or the City Council are up to the job of making the city less dangerous and certainly the Mayor is not even interested in the pleas coming from residents and businesses alike. The JFC reviewing Wilmington’s response to the data requests and the results of the consultant review is not unreasonable in that light and show tell you just how much pressure they are getting (mostly from the business community) to do something to change tactics. I’ve passed on the request from about a dozen WPD officers for the Governor to take over the WPD. Still — that possibility is pretty far down the road and really only possible if the city has done nothing as a result of the WPSSC effort. So this is Mayor Williams’ response to the foot patrol funding disappearing (this is on Facebook):
Yesterday the legislature’s Bond Bill Committee recommended that the General Assembly take away the $1.5 million set aside for extra police foot patrols in Wilmington. Unfortunately, people at the table continue to misrepresent exactly why this funding never came to Wilmington. The General Assembly and Attorney General continue to wrongly make this issue about providing information. Giving information regarding the police department has never been the key issue for the City. My primary concern was the condition tied to the $1.5 million, specifically the condition that would have given the General Assembly the power to recommend seizing Wilmington’s unilateral policing authority based on an outside assessment of the police department. Given that the State of Delaware has rarely, if ever, removed a municipality’s authority over its own police force, the City remains strongly opposed to accepting funding where the State threatens to take control of Wilmington’s police department. Wilmington wasn’t about to lose its police department on my watch. I personally expressed to members of the Joint Finance Committee, State Local Delegation, and Attorney General that if that condition was removed we would turn over the information to get the funding. They were unwilling to remove that stipulation. I wish all parties would’ve been able to come together and reach a solution that removed the unfair condition, created an opportunity for the City to turn over the necessary information and allowed Wilmington to gain access to funding for extra foot patrols.
There was no condition to recommend seizing the WPD. There was a provision for the JFC to review results and make a recommendation to the GA. A recommendation they could still make — whether the City takes the money, whether they provide the data or whether they meet with consultants. Because they are the General Assembly and they always have the power to redefine City charters here.
So Mayor Williams is still in Bamboozlement mode here — trying to convince people that the price of some additional safety is making sure he is completely unaccountable for his safety record. Because if Williams and Cummings were actually implementing the WPSSC recommendations rather than giving pretty poor lip service to them, they’d have no problem with anyone coming to review their progress. This is how you know little is being done.
Still — I am not going to let Wilmington’s City Council off of the hook here. The first (widely supported) foot patrols financed by the AGs office were in the spring of 2015 — in plenty of time for the Mayor and City Council to come to terms on funding these with city funds. The City has gone through one more budget round and the City Council was MIA in helping to get these funds into the budget. So let’s count that as a lack of leadership by some of the names looking for a promotion this year — Sherry Dorsey Walker (who is actually LIKING the Mayor’s posts on losing the GA funding while people are being shot in Browntown and she rushes to the cameras after a high-profile murder at Howard High School), Darius Brown, Justen Wright, Hanifa Shabazz, Maria Cabrera and Theo Gregory. You’d think that people looking for these promotions would be looking for opportunities to demonstrate some leadership in this area, but hey. Theo Gregory should have been on point here, but was MIA and let the Council be MIA on this as well. I think they voted on a Resolution to accept the funds, though.
This is a real loss for the City, although it would be easy to argue that if the City felt that they needed these foot patrols, they have had ample opportunity to fund them. And they haven’t — which is just one more signal as to how seriously the Williams Admininstration takes the issue of the safety of the City.