Nike?s “Just do it” may inspire athletic feats, but it should be shelved as a motto for public policy. Just doing something dominates what passes for public policy in Baltimore City too much of the time.
Take the recent proposals to curtail the upswing in murders ? 30 last month and 131 for the year, up 11 percent from the same time last year.
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City Council President Stephanie Rawlings-Blake proposes to spend $2 million from the city?s rainy day fund to recruit more police. The Baltimore City Police Department said recently it will more closely align operations with other law enforcement officials in the region and make detectives walk a beat occasionally.
On their own they are potentially decent ideas. Given that a recent audit of oneof the city police?s proposed partners ? the Maryland Transportation Police ? showed that some officers accessed porn on state computers as frequently as 2,200 times in one week, at least some people have lots of time on their hands to help.
But as “solutions” both Rawlings-Blake and the department?s plans fall woefully short of addressing the root causes of crime and place a disproportionate burden on the Police Department as the best way to stop it.
With 8,600 ex-offenders returning to the city each year with few job skills, little education and often with substance abuse problems, what are a few extra police going to do?
Why isn?t Police Commissioner Leonard Hamm talking about this statistic? Is he so caught up in fixing bad PR over the higher murder rate that he can?t lead?
Anthony McCarthy, Mayor Sheila Dixon?s spokesman, said the city does not specifically track how much it spends on ex-offender services. It should. It should also start tracking ex-offenders who use city services and those who earn degrees and job skills in prison against the rest of the population. That would help to monitor the effectiveness of those programs in assisting former inmates to find jobs and to become productive citizens.
Debating the merits of the utterly failed “War on Drugs” ? as City Council Member Bernard “Jack” Young as called for ? would also be a good start. Drug laws may be mandated at the federal level, but cities and states can exert moral and political pressure on our federal legislators to debate whether a better solution exists than the one luring young black men in Baltimore out of school to sell drugs on the streets before heading to prison at $25,000 per person per year.
So many of them could ask, like singer Ray Lamontaigne: “I said how come, I can?t tell, the free world from living hell?”
Leadership demands that Baltimore?s elected and appointed officials propose more than Band-Aids to mitigate the city?s social ills. Just doing something to just be doing something is a farce that offends everyone they represent. Worse yet, it allows the crisis to grow behind the sham.
