Posted by
Saltwater on Saturday, June 13, 2009 12:51:27 PM
Are you prepared to defend yourself
from the local gang-bangers? If you don't already own a gun, you
should get one, learn how to use it, and be ready. The police won't
be doing it anymore. They will be too busy giving criminals a stern talking
to.
A story in today's Wall
Street Journal reports on a new plan for combating crime to be
unveiled Monday at the U.S. Conference of Mayors.
At
least 30 cities are expected to announce Monday that they are joining
an unorthodox crime-fighting program that relies on persuasion,
rather than arrests, to cut down on criminal behavior.
The
initiative, run by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, targets
violent crime and open-air drug markets that are the scourge of some
communities. The program is potentially controversial because it
involves not prosecuting known offenders if they agree to quit their
criminal activities.
Potentially controversial? There's no
“potentially” about it. The plan calls for police to watch the
criminals go about their criminal activities, document them, and then
bring the bad guys in for a sit down where they will be told, “Stop
being a mutant, or we're going to tell you to stop again.”
Under
the project, law-enforcement officials and prosecutors in the cities
identify individuals operating in violent-crime areas who haven't yet
committed serious violent crimes, and build cases against them,
including undercover operations and surveillance. The culmination is
a "call in" when the case is presented to the would-be
suspect in front of law enforcement, community leaders, ex-offenders
and friends and family.
"The
prosecutor talks to them and lets them know: 'we could arrest you now
but we won't because the drug dealing stops today, the violence stops
today,'" said Jeremy Travis, president of John Jay. "If you
continue, you now know the consequences and you've seen the case
against you but we don't want to send you to prison."
Well, that should do it.
We have all had friends when growing up
who maybe had a nine o'clock curfew. At nine o'clock they headed
into their homes – and we knew why. They faced real, immediate
consequences for not following the rules. They had strong parents.
We also had other friends who did as they pleased, and when called on
it, would mouth off to their parents. We would step back so there
was a place for their teeth to land – but the parents did nothing
except ask them to be more respectful in the future. The stern
words carried no weight. Our friends knew it, and the same thing would happen over, and over, and over
again. They had weak
parents.
This “National Network for Safe
Communities” program is just a form of weak parenting on the grand
scale, and the criminals know it. They are surely laughing at what
may be the dumbest idea on how to deal with society's bottom feeders
since – I don't know – maybe the decision to close Guantanamo
with no plan on what to do with the illegal combatants being held
there.
Then there's Kim Jong Il laughing at
Obama's stern words about nuclear weapons.
Dennis P. O'Neil