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.

Exploration time!

Good news, everyone! The "exuberant" Ted DeSalvatore has formed an exploratory committee to look into running for mayor!

"It's a question of making sure, that's all," DeSalvatore said Friday.

"There seems to be an incredible outpouring to have me run for mayor, from the community," he said. "The exploratory committee has the task at hand of making sure that what we're hearing is in fact the truth, and not just the figment of the imagination of a number of people."

Well, I can answer that even without a committee.

There's a subset of people in Fitchburg who think Ted DeSalvatore is the cat's pajamas. A small subset. They're the ones with the good imaginations. They're also noisy. There's another subset that thinks he's an embarrassment to the city. Also a small subset. Less noisy, but more sane. Then there's a whole lot of people out there who have no idea who he is or what he thinks. It's those people he'd have to win over to become mayor.

Of course, that's easier said than done. Every time he opens his mouth something stupid comes out, and once he's officially a mayoral candidate more people are going to start to pay attention. At that point they'll realize he'd make a much better cartoon character than he would a mayor. A well-informed voting public is not Ted's friend.

But city residents have urged him to run, saying that "crime is out of control" and "the city has absolutely lost its friendliness," the councilor said.

Well, having an unfriendly city sure is problematic. I don't really see how you can blame that on the mayor though. I'd blame the weather. And the racially divisive marches.

As for crime, it certainly is slightly higher than in neighboring Leominster. But "out of control"? We're lower than the state average overall, though we do rank higher than the state average for violent crime. Let's call it a tossup. Crime could always be lower.

Of course, a mayor generally has to work well with the Chief of Police to do anything about crime. Given DeSalvatore's extremely rocky relationship with Chief Cronin I'm not sure that places him as the best man for the job. Maybe he'll just take his vigilanteism to the next level and run around town in his Bat-Mayor costume to deal with crime personally.

In other news, Dan Mylott is also going to run for mayor again. Which is no great surprise, but hardly the stuff excitement is made of. While Mylott seems like he means well (the same can be said of DeSalvatore), he's just not proven himself to be a very effective mayor. He does have the benefit of experience and name recognition that DeSalvatore lacks (despite Ted's incessant publicity stunts), but there are also plenty of people who will vote for "anyone but Mylott" in the upcoming race.

Let's hope some more people get involved. Anyone, please.


However, one word of warning to any potential candidates named "Matthew" or "Matt". My trolls have taken time off from tossing Ted DeSalvatore's salad to warn me they won't be voting for you because they think you're me (yes, all of you). Apparently when my parents gave me the ninth most popular boy's name of 1975 they didn't count on the possibility that I would one day have a blog about local politics. Go figure.

Former city councilor Matt Straight is in particular trouble, since apparently it's hard for people who've gone off their Haldol to differentiate between us. Of course, he has bigger problems.

What this all means to you unfortunate Matts and Matthews is you potentially may lose up to three votes from people who would have voted for DeSalvatore anyway. Try not to lose any sleep over that.

On a side note: In an attempt to limit future confusion caused by my having one of the most popular names of the last century I will now be writing under the pseudonym of "The Unicow". Hopefully nobody was planning on voting for her anyway. Although she just may be the best choice we have right now.

Happy New Year!

Well, I'm back from an interminable 10-day trip to Texas over the holidays. The highlight is reflected in this adorable picture of two meerkats at the Fort Worth Zoo. About 30 seconds after I took this picture they started having angry sex and making some horrifying noises. Children scattered. It was great!

I returned with a horrific cold, and in this sort of state I have a tendency to wander over to "Save Fitchburg". I made the mistake of looking at their poll today. It's about who you'd vote for for mayor if the election were held today. Horrifyingly, Ted DeSalvatore is way ahead. Not that I expect any less from the nice folks who visit Save Fitchburg, but yikes!

So, out of nothing more than antihistamines and spite I present my own poll:

---

How big an idiot is Ted "Liberty Walk" DeSalvatore?
	Really super hugely big, like crazy big man!
	Very very large indeed.
	Big, really big...
	So big he eclipses the sun.
	Bigger than Jesus.
	I think he's a very reasonable person, and you're an asshole for making this poll.

---

Only one vote per person please, this isn't the Sentinel & Enterprise.

Also, happy New Year!

Local leaders tired of this shit

I've been too busy to get many posts written lately, but this wonderful piece in the Sentinel just tugged at my heartstrings so much I had to write something:

Locals react to 'coarseness' in today's society

It seems that such moral luminaries as Ted "brown people scare me" DeSalvatore, Dean Mazzarella, and a bunch of Roman Catholic Bishops (who never do anything wrong) are upset that people do things like swear and watch television. Especially those kids with their long hair and Beatle boots.

DeSalvatore, in keeping with his batshit-craziness, has the best quotes:

A number of teenagers and younger children harassed marchers in the "Liberty Walk" that DeSalvatore helped organize this summer, he said.

Some of them wore gang-related apparel and tried to intimidate others, he said.

"If you stand on Wallace Ave., and you see some of these kids coming down the street, and you just close your eyes and listen, you'd think you're on another planet," he said.

Shocking! The leader of the not-so-subtlely racist "Liberty Walk" feels like he's on another planet when he sees kids whose culture he doesn't understand.

Ted, some of us have thought you're on another planet for some time now. And not just because you're standing on Wallace Ave with your eyes closed.

Another gem:

DeSalvatore said he worries that younger children will start to imitate Internet and television images of sex.

"You never used to see sex on TV, and now what you see doesn't take a whole lot of imagination," he said. "That's only going to generate a curiosity, and that curiosity is going to generate some action. It's worked with cigarettes, it's worked with alcohol, it's worked with drugs. We see somebody else doing it, we've got to try it, too."

Scary stuff indeed.

Seeing not-quite-sex on TV is going to make people curious about sex. Just like it did with cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs. None of which were problems prior to the widespread adoption of the television. Prior to that time people just assumed sex was something only dogs did, and were truly baffled by the Opium War and prohibition. Personally, I blame Milton Berle's legendarily large pecker for all this trouble.

Anyway, all you coarse people out there need to cut that shit out. Fuckwads.


Update: On the drive home I realized something. Ted simply has no understanding of cause and effect. Here are how things work in his mind:

• Cause: Three hundred lily-white people go for a march through neighborhoods they characterize in a press release as "filled with the criminally minded, aggressive, threatening individuals that make up our present gangs and drug dealers".
• Ted's Mind Effect: "We'll be greeted as liberators! They'll shower us with flowers and babies!"
• Real Effect: The locals think you're an idiot and aren't afraid to tell you so.

Similarly...

• Cause: For no particular reason, TV executives decide to put sexually-suggestive material on television. They also push drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, and probably the Homosexual Agenda (tm).
• Ted's Mind Effect: Teenagers are overcome by the peer-pressure of the glowing magic box and decide that maybe they should try this "sex" thing too. And smoke, drink, take drugs, and probably hire a gay hooker.
• Real Effect: Since people apparently like sex, ratings go up.

Just look over pretty much everything Ted DeSalvatore has ever said and you'll see the same wacky cause-and-effect distortion. I'd provide more examples, but I have to catch a flight to Thailand.