County Councilman Jea Street very publicly resigned as co-chair of council’s safety committee after condemning the fatal shooting of Lymond Moses.
“I go all the way back to when I was in high school and riots broke out in the 60s, and we looked up, here come the county police with long guns in riot gear. I was traumatized by it; it must have impacted me because 50-some years later I’m still talking about it. And there was no reason for the county police to be in Wilmington High School. The west side of Dupont Road is in the county, the east side here Wilmington High School is in the city. City police never showed up. To this day, there’s no explanation why the county showed up.”
“But that whole experience never went away from me. We couldn’t leave the school. We were going to do a walk-out, and that never went away for me, and people don’t understand, don’t realize, it’s still impacting me today. Because as Wilmington leadership met with school officials, and we prepared for implementation of the January 9, 1978 order, and we had to decide how we were going to police, city officials, including myself, city representatives, didn’t ask, we demanded that the county police have absolutely nothing to do with our children. So today, when you see the predominance of our schools are in developments, where jurisdictionally, state police have jurisdiction, that was purposeful and intentional.”
The human toll isn’t the only price we pay for police brutality. Settlements with the victims cost governments millions of dollars every year, enough to bankrupt smaller jurisdictions. You’d think those penny-pinching conservatives would take that into consideration, but nah. Small price to pay for keeping the uppities down.
A Superior Court judge has stayed the swearing in of former police chief Michael Capriglione as commissioner for the town of Newport (Motto: Too Small to Be Delaware’s Armpit) because he’s, y’know, on probation after being forced to resign in disgrace. The court’s going to sort it out.
The Republican Party, displaying the keen awareness of the problems of real people for which it’s famous, has decided to fight the Biden infrastructure plan on the hill of keeping corporate taxes low. Good choice, morans: Taxing corporations to pay for the plan polls 14 points higher than the plan itself.
Delaware is fiddling while other states burn one down, and President Joe needs to get with the program, too. The latest batch of states legalizing recreational pot means 43% of Americans now live in a state where it’s legal, proving that culture war battle has gone to the Dirty Fucking Hippies.
The Last Guy’s white-haired sidekick, Mike Pence, had a heart procedure performed. Doctors credited modern technology with helping them find the shriveled organ (no, not really. He just had a pacemaker installed.)
Still hanging on to that airline stock, hoping for a post-pandemic rebound? You might want to rethink that. Business travel is down, of course, but it appears it will stay that way even after the pandemic is over.
Over in Maryland, planners eyeing another crossing of the Chesapeake Bay have concluded the cheapest and least environmentally damaging place to do it is at the current Bay Bridge crossing site. Various groups are questioning the need given the pandemic, but officials say they’re planning for projected traffic levels in 2040.
Finally, after years of Trump tariffs, French winemakers were looking forward to an improved sales environment, but nature didn’t play along. A late freeze has destroyed up to 80% of the 2021 crop before it even got started.
The floor’s yours.