“Our Mayor’s” big crime plan

With various and sundry platitudes and vague promises, Nagin and co. announce their plans to get control of the city’s rising murder rate. What I don’t hear is any of that “transparency and accountability” he touted during the election. Da Mayor used to run a business at one time and claims to be running a businesslike operation at City Hall. So I gotta ask, where’s the goals? Where are the milestones? What are the consequences if they are not met? How about you publish your project plan.

If we had anything resembling true leadership, the mayor would have gone to his police and said something along the lines of “Look, I know that getting murders down to 0 is not realistic, so give me a realistic, measurable reduction in violent crimes that you believe your tactics can achieve in 3 month and 6 month intervals.” And if those goals are not met, presumably the police chief will step down. There should be public reporting of the progess.

He should take the same approach with the similarly useless Eddie Jordan and find out what his office will do to get their conviction rate up and what goals they intend to meet. And since Jordan continues to blame all his problems on the police, the mayor should step in and work that out. Give Jordan no excuses. Obviously C Ray can’t fire an elected official, but he can publically shame him. Clearly Jordan is not afraid of hyperbolic rhetoric so give him a taste of his own medicine. Of course, you’d think he’d be ashamed already since we continue to push cases into the Federal courts so we can actually get convictions, but apparently not.

About that 2am to 6am checkpoint idea, I have to wonder why those times are so “critical” in the police view. Reviewing the 2007 crime stats and Nola-Dishu’s via Google Maps tool, the only murder that occurred within that window appears to be the Helen Hill killing. Somebody might wanna back up that notion with some actual facts and figures. Of course, the crime rate in the Mayor and police chief’s view was down until last night so I have my doubts about their ability to interpret figures and statistics.

And stop blaming the public for not doing the jobs we hired you to do. We’ve been a little bit busy lately. So do what we’re paying you to do and stop the bullets from whizzing around our heads while we try and rebuild the city house by house. And then maybe — just maybe — we can get on the path of making fundamental changes in this city so we can address the root causes of the crime in the first place.

It’s a shame that the only real leadership being practiced in this city is by a football coach and his players.


Scott Harney

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