This is what you get when your mayor once marketed pizza and the city manager balanced the budget by cutting cops while insisting she wasn’t going to cut cops – a news conference to “offer some ideas about what communities and cities should do to address” urban violence (as Rudy Bush of The Morning News so deftly phrased it).
At the news conference, set for today, Rawlings will probably not talk about putting more cops on the street. He will probably not talk about Dallas’ commitment to community policing, which is the most effective way to reduce violence but also requires the city to spend money that it doesn’t want to spend.
What we are likely to get is one of those Kumbaya, gather around the campfire moments, in which Rawlings will try to look magisterial and tell us we must work more closely with neighborhood groups, churches, and the like (as if we don’t already). The word epidemic will probably be used, and he’ll get good play on the TV news tonight.
But what do you expect from the people who run a city that jiggles its crime stats?
