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Today’s announcement from the Mayor and Chief Bowers, what’s lacking? It’s great to hear they’re putting together a task force to help with crime, but it seems to be more focused on parades and special events, which seems to be only benefiting downtown.
The task force should aim for cleaning up our streets, helping our communities, and making community connections. It should be a mixture of police, mental health workers, addiction counselors, and more.
We should be working on safe spaces for retailers and restaurants to do business, so their customers and staff don’t feel unsafe just going in the door.
Helping people with addiction shouldn’t just be about rehab, it should be about helping them find a place to live and a job they can handle. Instead of just putting people behind bars, we should work with community services to have them help the community, whether it’s street cleaning, graffiti removal, or working on some of those 900 derelict houses that sit empty in the city while we have a housing shortage.
We should try to make the city safer for everyone. So yes, the task force is a good concept, but we’ll have to see where it goes and how much ends up being utilized for the community versus how much ends up focusing on only the downtown.
