Peoria Pundit

By Billy Dennis on May 24th, 2006

First, there’s no such thing as found money in government. The $100,000 the City of Peoria “saved” by not buying a generator the council decided wasn’t needed wasn’t money that fell into the council’s lap, like manna from heaven. Every cent of that cash came from taxpayers.

I applaud council member Gary Sandberg for wanting to slow down and not decide right away how to spend this money right away. Council member John Morris also voted against the measure, because he doesn’t like taking money out of the capitcal budget and putting it into operations. That doesn’t worry me so much, since it all comes from the same source — taxpayers’ wallets. And in this particular case, the money from a one-time expenditure, not routine maintance. No building is going unrepaired because of this.

But mostly, I’m not concerned that using the money to pay for “saturation patrols” is the right thing to do.

Crime is a huge problem. It’s why people are leaving Peoria and abandoning District 150 schools. It’s not because there’s not enough free parking on the riverfront.

But it seems to me that the only people who will really benefit from the saturation police patrols Chief Steve Settingsgaard described — increasing the police presence in very specific areas that are experiencing high crime — will be the police officers getting the overtime pay.

First, a lot of this crime is drug related. Many of clowns will simply take their act on the road. Sure, the saturation patrols will lead to arrests, some necessary and some not so much. I hear they arrested one master criminal who was walking down the street with a dreaded marijuana cigarette hidden on him. I bet it took him five whole minutes to buy another one.

But the measure of an effective police force isn’t the number of arrests, it’s how safe residents feel.

Second, every single drug dealer, armed robber, graffiti artist, prostitute, john, loud-music player in Peoria could magically be transported into a jail cell today, and it still won’t solve Peoria’s crime problem if we have a state’s attorney who won’t prosecute and judges who release arrestees on their own recognizance without paying one dime in bail money.

It seems to me that when the criminal justice system keeps releasing without bond those people who are arrested for not appearing in court to answer for noise violations and order ordinance violations, then the CITY needs to notify the public. The state’s attorney isn’t going to do that, and neither is the circuit clerk’s office. The same holds true when the arrestees are accused of more serious crimes.

I propose that the City of Peoria monitor the progress of its arrestees through the justice system, and issue a weekly press release on the status of the cases — in other words, tell the voters which charges have been dropped by the Peoria County State’s Attorney’s Office and which arrestees are released on bail or no bail. And be sure to assign the names of the judges and prosecutors, so fully informed voters can make appropriate decisions when they vote.

There’s no reason why this public information couldn’t be posted on the Web.

As the city council members have proven again and again, fear of voter outrage is a powerful motivator. Let’s apply that motivator to those politicians who have greater power to fight crime than does the Peoria Police Department, yet have so far been escaping public scrutiny and criticism.

Sure, it’s going to require some manpower. But it might be a more efficient way to spend that $100,000.

And once the justice system is working on behalf of law abiding residents and is actually holding criminals responsible for their behavior, then it makes sense to have more saturation patrols.

Saturation patrols won’t work when prosecutors won’t prosecute and judges won’t incarcerate

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 24th, 2006 at 9:00 am and is filed under The Wire. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.