The future is not necessarily wonderful to behold. Imagine taking the Green Line from downtown St. Paul to Target Field for a ball game. It is a nice summer day. You are gazing lovingly out the window at the blue sky and fluffy clouds, daydreaming of home runs, when suddenly you notice your purse is gone.
“Hey!”
But a hey doesn’t do you any good as the thief dashes out the open train door onto the platform and runs off into the distance.
If you were smart, you would have kept your phone in your pocket so you could call 911, ah, only to discover — the future not necessarily wonderful to behold, remember — that, if you fell under the jurisdiction of the St. Paul Police Department, you will be told to file a report online.
Because of staffing shortages, a willingness to embrace technology and manpower needed at ever increasingly violent crimes, St. Paul police will no longer respond to so-called lower-level calls. Why? A staffing study released by the police department two months ago showed 911 calls in St. Paul increased nearly 32 percent from 2013 to 2018, while the department’s authorized strength increased by less than 3 percent during that same time.
Most of us have led charmed lives and never sat down to a dinner of wiener water soup. But that’s what this is, a thin gruel. The police are stretched. They are needed to respond to domestic calls where they find a woman who died violently, a 2-year-old child in the same room, along with the man they take into custody for the crime. Happened last week, in an apartment on Pierce Street near St. Anthony Avenue.
Your purse? Forget about it. It’s not the police department’s fault. They need a city budget that spends for more police, rather than a city budget that has fattened the mayor’s Cabinet to at least 20 people and more people on the way for pie-in-the-sky programs calling for roving ambassadors and new environmental designs in public spaces in the belief that perhaps art deco streetlights and new plantings will soften the heart of a thug.
Big problem. Most calls are for low-level or quality-of-life crimes. But now we have to go online for the following: criminal damage to property; illegal dumping; harassing phone calls; lost property; theft from auto, unless the license plates were taken; fraud and forgery; detached garage burglary and theft, except for guns, motor vehicles and license plates.
The few times in our lives when most of us needed the police, it was for one of those reasons. Years ago, in the dead of winter, we turned the corner at the bottom of our block and saw a raging fire at what appeared to be our house. It wasn’t. A dumpster full of construction debris next door had been lit by vandals. But the sparks were jumping to my house and we called 911, and got a fire department response and a police car.
Things get cleaned up and you end up talking to the responders, and you develop a thread of relief, a thread of kinship, the kind of kinship that holds us together. Now, if you get an outboard motor stolen from your detached garage or a driver smashes your fence or you walk in to discover two television sets are missing, it’s off to the computer you go. The police won’t ignore your reports, but it’s not the same as a personal response. It’s not the same kinship that keeps us all together as honest people who do not commit crimes, but certainly need to report them.
This new policy, as it leaks into the undercurrent of low-level crimes, will most certainly embolden crooks, forgers, thieves and purse snatchers. Why, maybe they graduate to bigger and more violent crimes.
It won’t take long before low-level crimes will be known for what they really are, quality-of-life crimes. Downtowns at night, already problematic, will become more so. Using public transportation, already and often a disaster, will become more so.
Quality of life has always required a healthy relationship, a kinship, between police and citizens. A political class interested in a quality of life should budget for it.
"crime" - Google News
February 29, 2020 at 10:02PM
https://ift.tt/2wYNNWA
Soucheray: Call a cop? Nah, go type about your little crime. And our civic kinship takes a hit - St. Paul Pioneer Press
"crime" - Google News
https://ift.tt/37MG37k
Shoes Man Tutorial
Pos News Update
Meme Update
Korean Entertainment News
Japan News Update
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Soucheray: Call a cop? Nah, go type about your little crime. And our civic kinship takes a hit - St. Paul Pioneer Press"
Post a Comment