Office Enterprise 2007 We must acknowledge Newark

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AIM Google OpenID By Joan Whitlow/For The Star-Ledger The Star-Ledger
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Not long ago, Newark was setting records for crime reduction. That success was, no doubt, why Mayor Cory Booker was invited to be the main speaker at New York University Law School’s first Conversation on Urban Crime event two months ago.
I didn’t go. There is, however, a video of the event on the law school’s website.
No one could guess from his speech, but Newark’s crime statistics had begun a tragic climb in the wrong direction long before that October date rolled round.
This month, there has been a spike in carjackings, shootings, assaults and murders. It is all too reminiscent of the staccato frequency of crime before the Booker administration began claiming results and reductions.
Just before Christmas, there were incidents of murder in multiples:Two men leaving a North Ward social club. Two 16-year-olds gunned down with a third person and several wounded. An 18-year-old arrested in the murder of another 16-year-old. Yet another teen was arrested for the murder of a fortysomething man.
Some will blame Newark’s police layoffs — 167 officers gone at the end of last month. The mayor and police director Garry McCarthy started this year, however, trying to explain away 2009’s uptick in murders, the first increase in three years.
By Christmas 2010,Office Home And Student, Newark had 84 homicides, four more than 2009.
I agree with much of what the mayor said at NYU,Microsoft Office Professional 2010, including the idea that no city can solve its crime problem if all it does is arrest people. In Newark, the drug trade drives the crime. Homicides and shootings are the tragic indicators of how business is going. Anybody who does drugs, a lot or just a little now and then — including the out-of-towners who would not think of living here, but come to buy what the dealers sell — all of you are investing in death.
Turning the situation around, long term, means getting new generations to shun crime in all forms, providing an education (and not just in the schools), as well as an economy to compete with what goes on in the streets. Booker says we should tend to the at-risk kids, such as those whose parents have been incarcerated, and help the ex-offenders, so they don’t fall back on old ways. He spoke with eloquence about those things.
Booker told the stories those of us at home have heard,Office Home And Student, including the time before he was mayor when he held a dying teenager in his arms after a shooting.
It’s what the mayor did not say that troubled me.
There was nothing in the introductions or Booker’s speech to indicate that the reduction in crime was becoming past tense. When Booker gave that speech, Newark already had lived through its deadliest summer in decades. I wouldn’t expect the mayor to be prescient, to see — in October — that this deadly December was on the way. But by the time he gave that speech, he knew the city was facing significant police layoffs. It did not take a prophet to predict those layoffs might have some effect on the crime fight.
Booker said nothing about the layoffs when he was at NYU. Nor did he mention the layoffs the other day in Newark, when he pledged to put “dozens and dozens” of officers on the street and declared he would not “spare a penny” to beat back the crime surge — with 167 fewer troops.
Newark is safer than Little Rock, Orlando and Philadelphia, and safer than it was prior to 2006. Booker’s team reduced shootings — more than 400 people a year back then — by 40 percent. That’s how the conversation at NYU went. The Newark Police Department website says that, as of Dec. 12, there were 342 shooting victims in the city — which means the most recent mayhem has not yet been tallied.
Booker was right when he told his NYU audience that Newark has been draped in too many jokes and stereotypes. But you don’t protect the city’s reputation, or your own, by denying what’s real. The fact that the fight is never over,Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Plus, that gains won can be lost,Office Enterprise 2007, those are unfortunate truths. They come with the job a mayor is hired to do. Any honest conversation should be about reality, not just for entertainment, and it should be the same at home and on the road.