Note from Norm: Time to call Bullshit on Mayor Melvin Carter
“District Attorney Larry Krasner’s recent remarks about whether we are expending a crime crisis are some of the worst, most ignorant, and most insulting comments I have ever heard spoken by an elected official.”
- Michael A. Nutter, former Mayor, Philadelphia
On December 7th, in opinion piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer, the former African American Mayor of Philadelphia, Democrat Michael A. Nutter laid bare the liberal nonsense of progressive politicians of America’s great cities who have allowed them to become wastelands of murder, misconduct, and mayhem.
When the article was published on December 7th the former Mayor was calling on the District Attorney to apologize to the 521 “souls” whose lives have been lost in a blitzkrieg of homicidal violence in the City.
As I write this, less than a week later, three additional Philadelphia souls have given up their earthly home due homicides.
The District Attorney, while the City of Philadelphia swims in blood, said “We don’t have a crisis of lawlessness, we don’t have a crisis of crime, we don’t have a crisis of violence.”
A City which hasn’t seen the level of violence Philadelphia is experiencing today since 1960 now has a District Attorney, elected to prosecute criminals, enforce the law, and protect the citizenry who sees nothing, knows nothing, and hears nothing.
Yet, the District Attorney doesn’t have a monopoly on willful ignorance, deceit, and disinterest in governments primary job – protecting its people.
The Mayor of St. Paul, newly re-elected with a huge margin, Melvin Carter, has overseen the largest defunding of police of a major American City – all the while the City’s neighborhoods burn with the fire of gunshots, the cries of the dead and those they left behind.
Still, he denies the carnage in his midst.
And as the number of homicides in St. Paul, 35, exceeds the number that has ever been seen before in history, the Mayor shows no signs of changing course in his deliberate ignorance of the chaos in his streets. In a recent Minneapolis Star Tribune article, the Mayor of one of the fastest fading Capitol cities in America, responded to questions about why he insists in not fully funding his police department:
“But we are also seeing very clearly that an approach to public safety that just centers around getting here as fast as we can after someone gets shot or after something terrible happens isn’t producing the type of proactive public safety outcomes that we want.”
As the gunpowder hung heavy in the air on St. Paul’s West 7th Street and the dead and injured were being cared for and mourned the Mayor responded in much the same way – that having cops show up after a crime was too late and therefore having more cops didn’t make sense.
And, to my knowledge and recollection, for the first time in my adult life on social media I must simply say: Bullshit.
Ironically, I am simply echoing the thoughts, and comments, of the ultra-leftist Mayor of San Francisco Mayor London Breed who is finally addressing the epidemic of crime in her City this way:
“It’s time the reign of criminals who are destroying our city, it is time for it come to an end,” she said. “And it comes to an end when we take the steps to more aggressive with law enforcement. More aggressive with the changes in our policies and less tolerate of all the bullshit that has destroyed our city.”
Mayor Melvin Carter insists that he makes decisions about public safety based on the “data.”
The data shows his City’s communities, particularly the poor, the minority and the besieged, are being attacked, injured, shot at, and murdered in record numbers and his response to the data is deliberate and willful ignorance.
The fecklessness of Melvin Carter can no longer be ignored or excused as the naivete of youth.
His inaction is no longer well-intentioned optimism. It is malicious hubris wrapped in a charismatic politician whose followers, staff and corporate, political, and philanthropic supporters refuse to challenge and proclaim that the Emperor has no clothes.
As gang warfare raged in St. Paul in the mid-to-late 1990s then Mayor Jim Scheibel and those who enabled him refused to see the murderous horror that unfolded before them as they dismissed the very existence of gangs.
Today, the same collection of progressive activists and voices are held hostage to ideology as the least white of St. Paul bear the brunt of their white liberal privilege.
Let’s be clear: Those that are being shot, being preyed upon, and being murdered are overwhelmingly not wealthy – not privileged – and not white.
Those that cheered Ramsey County Attorney John Choi’s announcement he would not prosecute criminals who were stopped for a traffic violation are not the ones living in the middle of the worst combination of gun violence and murder in St. Paul’s history.
And any St. Paul City Councilmember who hasn’t condemned the Mayor – whose policies are aiding and abetting this crime wave – and hasn’t publicly and deliberately worked against his undercover campaign to defund the police in St. Paul are complicit in his malfeasance.
They own the tragedy that takes place with every gunshot in every neighborhood every day in St. Paul.
St. Paul re-elected Melvin Carter in a campaign in which the 35 souls who have so far lost their lives were not represented.
Nor were the voices of the thousands whose neighborhoods are alive with the sounds of gunshots every day.
The dead, and the dying, deserve better than a Mayor who refuses to accept that more cops on St. Paul streets isn’t the failed policy of the past.
The dead, and the dying, the good people of St. Paul, all deserve better than a Mayor who refuses to accept the fact that more cops on St. Paul streets isn’t the failed policy of the past.
It’s the proven policy for a safer City.