Mayor Redd Seals Camden's Doom

In 1968, my grandfather was mugged in broad daylight on the corner of Third and Stephens Streets in Camden, NJ.  His skull was fractured, and his neck was broken. He lingered, bedridden and unable to talk, until he succumbed to his injuries two years later.

I'd say it was a horrible way to die, and it was.  But worse, it was a horrible way to live; fully aware, and unable to communicate with anyone,  being fed through your nose, and suffering bed sores that went to the bone.

No one was ever arrested for this crime. Indeed, the police never had any suspects.  It's pretty certain they did nothing in terms of investigation; they reported that they had no idea where his car was; my father went to the spot where they picked him up, and it was parked 10 feet away.  With a parking ticket on it.

Things have not improved in Camden since then.  Crime rates have skyrocketed, earning Camden the title Most Dangerous City in the United States in 2004. It has consistently been in the top ten highest crime cities since 1998.  Currently, it's number two behind St. Louis.  In short, Camden has become hellish slum.

So, in a time of crisis, the very last thing you'd cut in a city with the highest crime rates in the country would be the police force.  Unless you're Camden Mayor Dana Redd, who is reducing the police force by 44%.

From CNN Money:

The mayor's office says that the cuts will not affect public safety.

"We're still going to protect our residents," said Robert Corrales, spokesman for Mayor Dana Redd. Public safety "will remain our top concern. We'll shift our resources to be more efficient with what we have."

Which only proves that Corrales is either an idiot, or a liar.  The city can't protect its citizens now.  It certainly can't do it with any less, let alone half.

Since the city is also laying off a huge chunk of its fire department, it's obvious that the mayor and the city commission doesn't give a rat's ass about the safety of its citizens. They might just as well fire everyone and set off firebombs and burn everything to the ground; the end result will be about the same.

From CNN Money:

One local business owner, David Brown, said he was anxious to see how the cuts unfold Tuesday.

"I don't understand how you can do more with less," he said. "I don't want to be a pessimist, but I can't be optimistic."

Yep, David.  You're fucked.  The Mayor and the Council have decided that it's time to put a lock on the title "MOST Dangerous City" once and for all.

The Philadelphia Inquirer sums it up eloquently:

For longtime residents, who have watched the city change over the last half-century from a bustling manufacturing center to one of the nation's most- dangerous cities, the pending loss of almost half the city's police force felt like the beginning of the end.

Thanks to Mayor Redd and the city commission, it is exactly that.  Perhaps Camden residents can find nice safe homes in Detroit or St. Louis.  It's damned certain that businesses won't consider Camden - unless it's to dump toxic waste.

CBS4: Cheese BrainS 4 South Florida

This is what the editorially challenged CBS4 news team posted on their home page Sunday evening:

There are three glaring flaws that anyone who knows anything about South Florida would catch:

1. The Broward clinic in question is not in Miami.  It is not even in Miami-Dade County.  It's in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, in Broward County.  It has no business being listed under "Miami News." 
2. "Broward Center" is not a generic term in South Florida.  It names a specific place.  The Broward Center is the performance venue in Fort Lauderdale, the Broward Center for the Performing Arts, and there was no explosion there, no one died there - at least not in the last few years - and it hasn't been closed for a year and a half.  The article is in fact about the NEUBAUER Center, more formally the Neubauer Hyperbaric Oxygen Neurologic Center.
3. Lake Worth is also not in Miami.  In fact, it is farther outside Miami than either the Broward Center or the Neubauer Center.

So, within a couple of inches, CBS4 got two locations wrong, and made a completely false statement about a venerated institution with a 20 year history in South Florida. 

I wonder what other really basic and easy to confirm facts these cheese-for-brains have put up on their site?

Dictionary Fun with Miami Police Chief Miguel Exposito

Miguel Exposito and the City of Miami Police Department has been making the papers by seizing and destroying video games that he claims are used for gambling.

The Miami Herald quotes Major Alfredo Alvarez:

"People get addicted to them, especially the senior citizens who live on social security,'' he said. It's immoral to have these machines out there the way they're hurting the lower to middle class.''

Note that he didn't say "criminal."   I find that fascinating.  "Immoral."  My grandma tells stories about bathing suit inspectors, who would measure the gap between the hem of her bathing suit and her bathing hose, because it was immoral to show more than 3 inches of your knee at the beach.  When someone is enforcing morality, I see them leering at young women, clammy hands gripping a measuring stick, looking for an excuse to prosecute someone who isn't doing  damned bit of harm.

I'm from Atlantic City.  I had a neighbor who was addicted to gambling; she cost her family everything.  Literally.  When they moved in next door to us the year before the casinos opened, her husband had parlayed hard work into apartment buildings in Philadelphia and Atlantic City, homes in both cities, cars for all the adults  (he drove a Cadillac that year, and so did she), and a boat.  25 years later, he died a pauper, with the clothes on his back and a  beater truck to his name.  She lives with her granddaughter, now.

I remember well the day that her husband discovered that she had taken out second and third mortgages on their last property - their house - to settle her debts.  She hadn't told him.  (There's a long and complicated story on how that happened, but that's for another time).  He thought he'd cut her off by not letting her have money.  He never dreamed that she'd simply sell everything out from under them to get a stake.

So, when Major Alvarez talks about the harmful effects of gambling, I know full well what the effects of gambling addiction really are.

So what exactly, are the stakes on the machines?  After all, the thrill of gambling comes from the rush of wagering a small amount against the possibility of winning a much larger amount.  The longer the odds, the bigger the rush.  So what can you win for your coin?

According to The Miami Herald:

Players insert money, receive credits and win when they land certain icons like a cherry or star.

Uh, say what?  They get... credits?

Well, maybe I misunderstand the word "Gamble."  So let's look it up, shall we?

gam·ble: intransitive verb -  1. to play a game for money or property 
- Merriam Webster

OK, so you put in your coin, and you get... well, a number.  A score.  How is that considered gambling?

Do you know what else you put a coin into, and at the end all you have is a numerical score?  A pinball machine. So why aren't the cops seizing pinball machines?

Because, apparently, pinball machines require skill, and it doesn't take skill to win anything at a video slot machine; you just pull the lever and pray.  Games that require skill are legal.  Games of chance require no skill, and so they are illegal.

That's it.  That's the big crime the cops are protecting us from.  Whoop-dee-fucking-doo.

I've never understood this reasoning.  If it requires no skill to win, if it's all random chance, doesn't that level the playing field?  "What does it take to win this game? DUMB LUCK!"  Why is are games that require a skill, games where a skilled player can clean out an unskilled one - why are they "better" than a game of chance that relies on, well, chance?

And frankly, the money being tossed around these things - CHUMP CHANGE.  Gran-dad lost his cigarette money - oh, no, now he's not going to kick off from lung cancer!!

But when you have a City police force full of thugs who shoot people at the least provocation, I guess arresting people who aren't actually doing any harm is more important than, I don't know, ticketing all those insane motorists who pose a real danger to life and limb by running red lights in this city a hundred times a minute.  Or pulling over aggressive drivers before they shoot someone.  Or shooting people who spit their gum out on the sidewalk.  You know, actual criminals.  They could be seizing guns, or drug paraphenalia, things that KILL people.  Instead, they are protecting, for lack of a better word, our virtue.

I hate to say it, but Mayor Regalado is actually right on this one; license the machines and tax the owners.  If people want to throw away their hard-earned money, who the fuck is Miguel Exposito to stop them?  He should quit wasting taxpayer money on something so mind-bogglingly stupid, and go stop some real crime.  It's not like we've run out down here in Miami.

And then you get pinheads like Bob Sertell.  He's a "gaming expert."  Which I'm pretty sure means that prosecutors pay him to tell juries that gambling is bad.  Nice work if you can get it. 

Here's an example of his so-called expert advice, again quoted from the Miami Herald:

"The `application of skill' is bull,'' Sertell said. "In actual practice, none of the machines do that.''

See, because someone decided that random chance, the guiding force of the entire fucking Universe, is wrong, they've decided to define gambling not by its proper actual definition, but a made-up one, where it's OK if it takes skill, but it's not OK if it doesn't.

Do you follow that?  Me either, but that's because we're not puritanical assholes. 

Let's look at it another way:

• GOOD: working hard to save up $100,000,000,000
• BAD: winning $100,000,000,000 in the lottery.

Why is playing the lottery bad?  Because for every person that wins $100,000,000,000, there are about 200,000,000,000 who simply lost a buck.

Oh, wait, the Lottery isn't illegal!  Which is odd, because 1. it takes no skill to play the lottery, and 2. it is actually gambling because you are risking a small amount of cash to win a large amount of cash.  (remember, the video games being seized do not pay out anything - you earn a high score).

If gambling by laying a game that takes no skill to win is a crime, and the police must seize gambling machines at any cost, why hasn't Exposito seized a single Lotto machine?   Lotto exactly fits both the actual definition of gambling - putting out a little money in hopes of winning lots - and fake priggish gambling - there is no skill whatsoever involved, it's all dumb luck.  Why isn't Alvarez storming every Publix and 7-Eleven in town? Is there any way that this isn't a hopeless double-standard? 

No.  That's exactly, precisely, all it is.

What this tells us, ultimately, is that Chief Exposito and Major Alvarez aren't interested in catching criminals so much as enforcing arbitrary moral standards codified by a bunch of prudes onto the citizens of Miami, who largely don't give a rat's ass.

Which is why gang members are free to drive by people's homes and fire guns into them, assholes are free to run red lights, and none of us are safe in our own homes.

Exposito is supposed to be protecting us.  He isn't.  Instead, he's doing something else on the taxpayer dime:

GAMBOL: intransitive verb - to skip about in play : frisk, frolic

Hmm, sounds like just the crime he likes to prosecute....