Are Our Communities Safe ?

The Patch Articles I offer are not social science, academic or legal documents. They are intended to be a written conversation with a neighbor over the back yard fence.

Nor do I write these articles as if I was wiser, smarter, better informed than the Reader. What I hope to share are lessons I learned in my 50 years/half of a Decade in the political world at the Town, County, State & Federal levels, not as a Principal, mostly only as a Staffer/listener.

To begin, my first observation is that the highest priority of every elected government official is to get re-elected.

Certainly most want to serve altruistically to solve problems and make thing better, but doing what they hear vis a vis what the voters want comes first.

Ergo, every citizen serves our community best by telling their elected Representatives what they want.

This brings me to what I want to suggest to you is the following.

In my head, my readers are aware vis a vis the TV and internet mostly, of every frightening thing happening or going to happen across our globe, nationally and State wise, starting with the pandemic and maybe the climate change and everything in-between. What I want is to attract your attention and focus on the following.

Young people dragging old people, mostly old women, by their hair to the ground and hurting/robbing them - stabbing them - pushing them in front of trains, sometimes raping them and the other horror is shooting people to death on impulse or purpose as if it was the normal thing to do. It's the behavior of an animal

Ok, it's not on the scale of pandemic or climate change, not even on the scale of most of the horror you seen on the TV.

I say it's worse. It's a humankind cancer of the mind/behavior that breeds fear, triggers more worst racism when the perpetrator is an African American or an Immigrant. People are growing fearful, suspicious and sometimes hateful. Furthermore, too many people are believing America is decaying morally and fuctionally.

So I ask everyone to ask their elected Government Representatives to move personal safety on the streets and in homes to their highest priority. Remove those committing these sub-human sins and crimes that result in death or permanent body/mind damage to others from the general population. Build up not tear down those responsible for street safety.