Since when is homocide not personal?
Especially when you’re the mayor of the city in which it occurs.
Apparently to Inaction Frank Jackson – mayor of the 4th (yeah we’re number 4!) poorest city in America (which makes you rich in 90% of the rest of the world), when someone dies at the hands of another it’s seldom personal – except for yesterday. From the fishwrap:
“When reporters asked Jackson why he has devoted special attention to this murder case above others, the mayor said only that it was personal and declined to elaborate.”
The mayor’s spokeswoman later clarified that the mayor was taking personal interest in this case only because, “he happened to know the child’s mother.”
I know that I’m being overly harsh on the man who’s helped to make the most of us the least of us, and I even admit to taking the comments of his spokeswoman out of context – but I don’t care.
Every time somebody dies in this city, it’s personal to me and all of us who made the conscious decision to help this city by living here. It’s time this mayor gets a grip and brings in more cops, shows less tolerance of those who don’t obey the rules, and leads vocally as well as literally.
The leadership through aloofness and inaction must come to an end. The cheerleader of silence needs to get active and it already may be too late. Unless he does something REAL – we’re all going to be taking it more and more personally.
there have been some bad appointments at the administrative level. if better personnel had been appointed to those positions, the mayor could get away with remaining low key politically. but the combination of low key and bad cabinet staff representatives for the administration is a recipe for disaster. an easy solution to much of this mess is to take one of these old buildings that are strewn all over town and make it into a juvenile holding facility. a juvenile can go out and steal a car every night of the week, get caught every night of the week and be sent home to his mother every night of the week without ever having to spend any time locked up in the detention home. start housing these unrulys when they get arrested and make them do two years for stealing a car, or commiting a burglary etc. while in lockup they would have to attend a bootcamp type school. this would not only clean up the streets immensely, it would improve the quality of the public schools as well, since it is the little criminals who make the schools such a hard place in which to excel academically for those who choose to do so. build it and they will come – AND STAY! maybe diamond jimmy and taxin tim could use some of the money left over from the convention center tax to pay for it and at least salvage something out of this horrible deal at the eleventh hour.
[...] The recent brouhaha over a Jeff Darcy editorial cartoon (which I have linked to here but will not publish so as not to infringe on their copyright and so I don’t offend anyone) that rightly pointed out lethargic mayor Frank Jackson’s sudden desire to insert himself into just another (now over 100) murder investigations has got new Editor Susan Goldberg begging for forgiveness. Instead of standing up for the paper’s editorial page and the use of satirically-charged artwork to hammer home a point, Goldberg chose to say she and the paper were sorry for the offensive and insensitive nature of the cartoon. [...]