Crime, A Gigantic Toothache

It’s been a rough summer for Mayor Bill Finch.

Damn tornado rips through the downtown, city cops arrest his son Pete for hauling a wind-blown street sign into a local bar, charges fortunately dropped by a state prosecutor.

Finch’s budget is bleeding badly and he needs millions in union concessions to close the gap. One department he sought for savings, the Fire Department, suffered two deaths in the line of duty. Any thought of laying off fire personnel went out the door.

The mayor was also looking for concessions from the city police union, but then violent crime spiked. The city now has 19 homicides this year. Last year the entire year experienced 14. So much for a public battle for police cuts. Let’s trim the overtime budget and be done with it.

Last week his candidate for governor Ned Lamont who outspent his primary opponent Dan Malloy by just about four to one gets croaked. Shows ya what $10 million can get. The amount Ned spent in the failed primary would cover the budget gap and more. Lamont was Finch’s ticket to a state commissionership.

The crime situation is extremely fragile for Finch. Despite negotiating a cranky budget each year Finch has waltzed through nearly three years as the city’s chief executive without crime as a governmental toothache. It is now. And if it continues an abscess is waiting to form. Bring on the root canal. Ouch! The last two homicides have occurred in the North End. If voters in higher turnout areas completely lose faith in Finch they will punish him next year. That’s why he’s not sticking his head in the sand over the latest murders. He’s showing his face in the neighborhood to express concern and try to defang the fear. This becomes a dicey juggle for the mayor.

The more concern you show the more you own it. If the spike in violent crime goes away Finch may receive credit for acting quickly. If the trend continues voters may say he cares but he can’t snuff it out. Then it becomes a ballot box weakness. Yes, the budget blew up during Mayor Tom Bucci’s second term, but the crime rate was nuts and Republican Mary Moran pounced in 1989. Yes, the budget blew up under Moran, but the crime rate was nuts and Democrat Joe Ganim pounced in 1991. Things improved dramatically by the late 1990s and crime hasn’t been the bogey man it once was … until now perhaps. Hopefully, this violent crime spike may be an aberration, but if it becomes a trend the two biggest pieces to quality of life–the budget and crime–are political poison for an incumbent.

Crime has not been a major campaign issue for many years. It may be back next year.

Jeff Kohut, veteran block watcher from the Lake Forest area, offers these public safety suggestions. Feel free to weigh in as well. From Kohut:

1. Internet-accessible Video Surveillance System: In order to augment/enhance police patrol presence and thereby discourage/prevent violence/criminal activity, and to additionally provide an automated, super-efficient means of real-time monitoring/recording of all aspects of public-safety, citywide (indicated measures for any modern municipality, even under optimal socioeconomic/global-political conditions), the city must install a “secure”, citywide, Internet-accessible, public-safety video-surveillance camera system. Such a system would allow for continual, recorded, real-time, virtual public-safety patrols to be performed by authorized civilian volunteers in tandem with police personnel — by way of the current Block Watch/Community Policing initiative… Super-efficient, automated, real-time, digital monitoring/recording of all aspects of public-safety could be accomplished through such a system, greatly enhancing our overall municipal emergency-response efficiency/capacity…

This measure can be accomplished fairly economically, via current wireless (non-infrastructure-intensive) digital technology (e.g., a system utilizing mobile Internet devices and Internet-accessible web-cams would suffice), and could be financed via federal, state, and private grants designed to address various modern municipal needs in regard to basic public-safety, homeland security, commerce, traffic/transportation-safety, digital technology proliferation-utilization, etc… 

* Please note that such a system, as described above, was proposed and pursued for neighborhood usage for several years by the Lake Forest Block Watch prior to enlisting the advocacy of then-Bridgeport state representative Lydia Martinez for the implementation of a citywide system, who, together with then-state senator Bill Finch, managed to retain a $300,000 state pilot-project grant for Bridgeport for such a citywide system in 2006… Presumably, that (entirely unused) funding is still available…

2. Hiring of Permanent Police Chief: A police force “under the gun”, as it were, as ours is, can’t afford any inefficiencies in the operation of its command chain — indeed, an efficient, “Buck Stops Here”, unequivocal operational hierarchy/chain-of-command is of the essence in a challenged policing situation such as ours… Therefore, there can be no further delay in the process of hiring a permanent chief for Bridgeport’s police force…

3. Request for Emergency Federal Jobs/Training/Activity Funding: Inasmuch as the current alarming trend in the Bridgeport homicide rate is (presumably) closely related to Bridgeport’s very-high/chronic youth/young-adult unemployment and poverty rates, a direct appeal by Bridgeport to the federal government for emergency funds to be used to expand/create jobs, job-training, and youth activity programs, on a long-term basis, for at-risk Bridgeport youth/young adults, by way of gang-diversion tactics, needs to occur in very short order. The federal government should be receptive to such a request in the context of the mounting evidence of the need for the emergency development of such programmatic, youth-directed stimulus funding on a national level (in light of current national economic indicators and youth crime trends)… (It is incumbent upon our federal and state delegations, and city and state leadership, to make a strong case for such funding in order to do everything possible to keep Bridgeport from re-entering the public-safety Twilight Zone and losing yet another generation of Bridgeport youth…

4. Secure a Specific, Major, Federal-State-Private Economic Development/Jobs Commitment for Bridgeport (GE site): Bridgeport’s collective mental and emotional health is in dire need of a real, major proverbial “bright spot on the horizon”. For Bridgeporters, a “bright spot on the horizon” means “living-wage jobs/tax relief.” A major economic development project presenting the realistic prospect of major job opportunities and eventual major tax relief would go a long way in assuaging the stresses and anxieties of Bridgeport families and young adults. If our federal and state delegations — and city and state leadership — would engage GE, with appropriate pragmatism and determination, to take the opportunity to make the wise and patriotic business decision to establish a major, state-of-the-art, corporate-flagship green-alternative-energy products R and D/manufacturing facility on its 76 Bridgeport acres (in the virtual shadow of its corporate HQ), the jobs/tax-base-producing results/future prospects could help to give Bridgeport families and young adults some hope and wherewithal to resist crime/violence and negative behavior… It could conceivably serve as the elusive catalyst for the economic recovery of our long-suffering city (or, in more Bridgeportesque terms, as the “economic anchor” of this long-adrift, blue-collar ship…).