10/8/07 Emerald City Gang/Crime Community Meeting Notes

By Bill C.

I have to say, no public forum (last night's crime & gang community meeting) is a completely bad thing, but this one left me wondering.

Was I attending a community meeting called by a community with a huge problem, looking for solutions, or a campaign function?

I believe some of both. The sad thing is, the way it went down left me with a feeling of cross purpose, neither intention could be accomplished.

A community with a violent crime problem seeking answers and solutions is probably not the best place to practice useless campaign rhetoric, or have pre-arranged plants occupy the "mike" and sing your praises during what was offered as a question and answer period.

And it hardly seemed appropriate to expect candidates to respond to specific questions regarding things that they would have no knowledge or way of knowing the particulars of specific events, like individual police calls and subsequent actions.

Some on the panel never said a word all night, nothing was directed at them. One tried to insert himself into the response once, (maybe feeling inadequate or irrelevant) only to seem rather silly for his efforts. Clearly an ill conceived format. Fair to neither purpose.

The proper format would have been to have elected (current) officials answering their constituents. No politics. For the most part it was the Godfrey Greiner show, and rightfully so. This situation is pretty much a byproduct of their poor job performance, or their choice of priorities.

But as a keen observer of lying little Matty, I did take some notes. Heres a sampling:

Godfrey's first statement was how he's reduced crime 23% and then went on to say the force has been increased 20% since under Greiner. (note, under Greiner means lying little Matty has lied about this in the recent past. He used to take full credit for that stat.)

Then Godfrey said the force is now up to 150 or 160 officers. (well matty, is it 150 or 160?) Then Godfrey went on to explain how for 1 month now he's instituted a special 2 man crew that will harass and remove bad elements from neighborhoods. this will hopefully increase to six officers in November, he said.

He then went through how his administration is following all the same policies and priorities he instituted upon his taking office, and now with these same policies and more determination they are going to get more aggressive. (always the crime fighter) When asked when they came to this new determination he responded, 4 to 6 weeks ago. (obviously no polling influence).

It was when lying little Matty concluded his 20 to 30 minute opener the moderator asked Mrs. Van Hooser to comment. Pretty good blind side. Under the circumstances she did quite well. A quick summation would be, why now? where have we been?

Some of the more interesting notes from Greiner are," in 1975 we had 125 officers and now have 140". Wait, I just heard the mayor say 150 or 160, who's fibbin'? Greiner repeated the 140 on multiple occasions.That would be a 12% increase. Greiner pulled out some stat I've never heard and referred and concluded that this put us in a crime level equivalent to Moab and Park City. Greiner also said they get 300 911 calls a day. I wonder if Moab has such a call volume?

The other real contradiction between the mayor and chief of police was, lying little Matty claims to have increase the force by 20 officers in the last 2 years. Later Greiner offered this in response to a question," we've increased by 20 officers in the last 10 years."

Greiner also claimed the reason for increasing the traffic patrol was that the citizens demanded it, making a case that that is still the no. 1 priority of the populace.

Other notes on the Godfrey sheet include a claim that he tried to increase the police force by 30%, but the Council wouldn't go along with the funding.

The last thing of note on the lying little Matty sheet required putting 2 responses from separate questions together. While explaining how certain money can be used only for certain uses lying little Matty tried to say that his economic spending has not conflicted with police funding. RDA money is generated by the developers and their projects, he said. When later dealing with a more pointed question about his priorities he responded,"there's only so much money to go around; we decided that economic development was going to be our priority."