Kohut: Bring Back Block Watches

City resident Jeff Kohut, an active member of a block watch in the Lake Forest area for years, argues in a commentary one solution to stemming the increase in violent crime is resuscitating block watches in neighborhoods.

Regarding homicides of the July 4th weekend in Bridgeport per quotes from BPD in the CT Post and OIB: Chief Perez stated, “The loss of a life and any act of violence is tragic and upsetting for all of us in the community. While these acts may leave cause for concern, the general public should not feel threatened. These are not random acts against residents, they are isolated incidents between individual subjects.”

Isolated incidents or not, they present life-threatening dangers to any persons in the proximity of such incidents–as we know from the Bridgeport legacy of the deaths and serious injuries to bystanders/neighbors and interveners (or perceived, potential interveners) in such incidents (many of recall in recent months and years).

Moreover, such incidents are reflective of societal ills endemic to impoverished urban areas (of which Bridgeport is the poster child) such as Bridgeport and are symptomatic of the failure of the main instrument of societal oversight/intervention in civilized societies–government–to conceive of and enact measures and policies to eradicate the type of poverty and associated conditions/behaviors that incubate and produce such violence.

The City of Bridgeport is on state and federal life support, which cannot be sustained in the context of failing/dysfunctional Connecticut state government and the currently chaotic federal government. This city is failing to acknowledge and implement local measures to stem the continued erosion of essential revenue sources needed to enhance social and public safety services in regard to these conditions. Indeed, a functional city government would be aggressively designing and implementing measures to retain and augment municipal revenue sources in this regard–and this design would include a heavy emphasis on the co-requisite creation of local, living-wage jobs.

The current city administration is failing miserably in this regard–as have all of the municipal administrations of the past 50 years.

Bridgeport residents should be particularly conscious and restive of the state of their city and public safety risks. A responsible city government would be reaching out to the public in a variety to ways to secure the input and cooperation of the public in addressing the root causes of our eroding municipal health and public safety conditions.

What we don’t need is a municipal propaganda machine–aided by the mainstream media–continuing to lull the people into complacency concerning the dangerous state of our city, state and nation. If this sounds alarmist, recall a similar period of a confluence of city, state, and federal shortcomings, re: US cities, in the face of a drug epidemic (e.g., the crack epidemic of the late ’80s-mid-’90s). We now have a situation of an opioid abuse epidemic in the context of severe city, state, and federal government dysfunction/failure in a situation of high unemployment in the context of fabricated government statistics that would indicate otherwise.

The first that Bridgeport should do is reactivate its purposefully derailed block-watch program, which was last a fully-functional priority in the Fabrizi Administration, but which has been suppressed for political reason by the Finch and current administrations.

Enough of downplaying the significance of the rising Bridgeport murder/violent crime rate! And enough of pretending that things are “Getting better every day.”

Enough of BS, feel-good propaganda from all levels of government generated to maintain a miserable status quo in our urban areas (for the nefarious purposes of maintaining feudal social conditions in our region, state, and country).