Police

What you won’t find the private police working on…

Dayton used to have a police force of 500 sworn officers. The city may have less people, but it’s still shaped like an octopus and big. Now, Dayton has around half that. Still, racially unbalanced compared to the general population. And, still, unable to find the killer of one of their own. You’ve seen the Read More

Truancy delinquents

What to do with punk kids skipping school

In the last week, I’ve stopped kids walking down Bonner Street during school hours and asked them why they weren’t in school. The river of BS flowed freely out of their young mouths. My standard response goes something like this: “Do you want to grow up to be under-employed the rest of your life? Do Read More

Public Safety is “economic development”

The Dayton City Commission spent $95K yesterday to “study reuse” of buildings downtown- while at the same time, the Chief of Police and the Fire Chief are both still trying to hire new officers. Somehow city hall has things confused- they seem to think that people will invest in Dayton when the government refuses to Read More

Atlanta has leadership- we have Leitzell.

In Dayton, our solution to the big hole in our population is to decrease the number of homes. It’s a rear guard, defensive effort that puts money into the hands of the demolition contractors (who are big campaign donors) and the landfill operators. And although the analogy that starts this excerpt from Thomas Friedman is Read More

Old school ways vs the new way- are we better off?

This is not an indictment of Officers Simmons or Stimmel, but a question of our methodology today, vs the methodology of days gone by. I was struck by the honesty of this “exit interview” in the paper today. Two of Dayton’s finest from the “Good old day” generation are retiring. In it- they mention the Read More

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