Shocking news! Ted's not big on tolerance!

Oh boy, Ted's back in the news. Thankfully, this time it's just for having dumb ideas and not for bullying veterans or mistreating the hungry.

And in what will come as a surprise to no one, the homophobic guy who's led racially-charged marches through minority sections of town is advocating "Zero Tolerance".

Per yesterday's Sentinel Article:

Zero tolerance, from the city's police department to its code enforcement officers, is needed to revive the blighted neighborhoods here, according to mayoral candidate Ted E. DeSalvatore.

"I'm not looking for discretion, I'm not looking for diplomacy," he said in an interview this week with the Sentinel & Enterprise's editorial board. "I want to identify the hot spots, our blighted areas -- the worst ones -- and within them, which are the worst dwellings. Going in with the intention to make sure they stop doing business the way they're doing it no matter what."

Yeah, discretion and diplomacy are terrible traits in a leader! Heaven forbid we elect a mayor who understands that not everything is black and white!

Wait a second, dwellings do business? Huh?

Of course, it's not really fair to make fun of the guy's inability to form a coherent sentence. If it were, I'd have to make fun of this terribly poor choice of words (my emphasis):

"After dealing with drug dealers on the corner, my inspiration was to continue on," he said.

... and making fun of that is just too easy.

Then there's this one:

"I don't live far away from 'hell zone.' I'm on the edge of it," he said. "I walked it, I drive it. I'm pretty much like the thermometer, I've had a good grip on the pulse of the community."

It gives me an idea for a new campaign slogan for him, though. "Vote Ted, he's the thermometer of Hell zone!" If you're reading, Ted, you can use that one free of charge!

Also, way to badmouth Fitchburg some more! Nobody's at all tired of that. On the other hand, I have no difficulty believing that Ted's neighbors would view their neighborhood as "Hell Zone", I just suspect it's for different reasons than he does.

On to the zero tolerance bit though:

"I want a guy [for the new police chief] that's going to be a top cop. I want him to keep his nose out of the politics and I want to leave the social-service work to social-service workers," he said, offering praise for Rudolph Giuliani, former mayor of New York and current Republican presidential candidate's approach to combating crime in New York. "I believe we need to have pretty much a zero tolerance."

Oh man, do you really want to hitch your wagon to Rudy "my only accomplishment as mayor was my city got struck by a terrorist attack" Giuliani?

Okay, that's not entirely fair either. Prior to 9/11 Giuliani was better known for police brutality, increasing racial tensions, harassing a lot of innocent people for no reason, racial profiling, and of course cheating on his wife and generally treating his family members like shit. Why do you think his daughter supports Obama for president?

To continue:

DeSalvatore later said, "There have been a lot of restrictions on our local guys and girls," partly because of "a touchy-feely thing that was brought in by the previous chief. Nice guy, but I think he was much too soft for the environment that we're in."

I believe "guys and girls" here refers to police officers (and I'm sure the female officers love to be called "girls").

Of course, here's the big problem. Shockingly, the Sentinel neglected to put this statement in context, but I'll fill in the blank. Chief Cronin's approach was actually working quite well. I've written about it before here. In a nutshell, crime has been decreasing. Want to see for yourself? Go get the 2006 Fitchburg Police Department annual report here (it's a .pdf).

I'm not going to go into a whole analysis of the thing, but the "Crime Index" on page 10 (page 12 of the pdf) gives the basic story. Lower is better.

• 2002: 2,302
• 2003: 2,526
• 2004: 2,546
• 2005: 2,286
• 2006: 1,927

Hmm, the facts seem to indicate that the crime rate has been improving! Seems like Cronin was on to something. What could it have been?

Here's an old quote from Cronin:

Cronin said the department has been focusing on more than just suppression, acknowledging through programs, reinforcement and advocacy that crime is a much larger issue affected by outside factors such as economics and race.

"We've generated a big picture way of looking at the problems," Cronin said. "You can't keep hitting things in one way, you can't keep arresting people and ignore the outside factors that have contributed to the crime, and minority status and poverty are right on top."

Yeah, that's a very sensible approach. One that actually addresses the source of the problems rather than just punishing people after the crime is committed. If you stop it at its roots you don't have to worry about that.

Of course, Ted would presumably call that "social service work", which as we know he doesn't care for. More sensible people would call it addressing the roots of the problem. If you want to keep crime down it makes a lot more sense to keep it from occurring in the first place. If you want to live in a police state though, Ted's your man!

Why does DeSalvatore keep harping on crime so much? Well, it's all he's got. As far as concrete plans for improving the city go, he's way behind Donnelly and Wong. Anyone who votes for him is going to do it because Ted's convinced them that they're in some sort of imminent danger and only he can protect them.

Unfortunately for his campaign (but fortunately for the people of Fitchburg) that's simply not true. Come the primary, Ted will hopefully realize what Republicans the country over have been finding out: you can only scare people into voting for you for a limited time. Once the truth becomes known and the boogeymen of your own creation dissipate, so does your political career.

Let's hope people realize that truth sooner rather than later.

Crime down, doomsayers disappointed

Good news for people like me who keep insisting crime in Fitchburg isn't as bad as people make it out to be. It actually isn't!

Or at least it's not as bad as it was in 2005, according to this article in the Fitchburg Pride about the Fitchburg Police Department's 2006 report.

According to the Fitchburg Police Department's 2006 annual report, overall crime in the city dropped 15 percent from 2005, especially in areas of drug incidents, breaking and entering, rapes and assaults.

Unfortunately, the most recent report on the FPD website is from 2004. It would be nice for them to put out some recent figures to the public, since people (particularly candidates) have been harping on how terrible crime is despite evidence suggesting otherwise.

So why's crime down? That of course is going to depend on who you ask. But Chief Edward Cronin had something to say that more public figures should listen to:

Cronin said the department has been focusing on more than just suppression, acknowledging through programs, reinforcement and advocacy that crime is a much larger issue affected by outside factors such as economics and race.

"We've generated a big picture way of looking at the problems," Cronin said. "You can't keep hitting things in one way, you can't keep arresting people and ignore the outside factors that have contributed to the crime, and minority status and poverty are right on top."

Holy crap! Address the roots of crime instead of just blindly focusing on enforcement and things actually improve!

He goes on:

He says the department's approaches are about empowering others.

"It's not about things like language, but the affirmation of who someone is when they walk in here and about serving the community honestly and with humility because in my mind, that's what leadership means," he said.

"I'm not saying we don't have problems," he continued, "But we're making progress without having to use thug policing. I have always said that our community is not our enemy."

Indeed it's not.

One of the big problems with things like the "Liberty Walk" is that they treat the community as the enemy. Almost explicitly in that case, since the idea was to get a bunch of people who didn't live in the "bad" neighborhood to walk through that neighborhood, essentially belittling the people who do live there. It's no wonder they were met with scorn by the residents. They were treating that entire community as an enemy, one they could apparently only face with an army of like-minded walkers with them.

Ted DeSalvatore's vigilantism does the same thing. As I quoted in an earlier post:

DeSalvatore admits he regularly walks through neighborhoods in his ward which have a reputation for drugs and violence, often taking videotape and calling the police if he spots illegal activity.
DeSalvatore also acknowledges that certain people often ask him to leave, which he refuses to do.
He says that on one recent occasion, he told a confrontational young man on Elm Street, "I'm going to be back here every day just for you."

Clearly, to some of our mayoral candidates, the community is the enemy.

Glad to see Chief Cronin has the right attitude.

Incidentally, don't expect people to drop the spurious "crime is out of control!" claims. They've never been based on facts anyway, so more recent facts aren't going to change anything.