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03/22/04 Collect data and prepare reports.
If you live in Dallas or even in the Metroplex, you
already know what's not working at City Hall -- almost everything. You
also know what's going well at City Hall -- almost nothing.
If there is anything funny about this terrible state of our city, it's that Our
Downtown Betters (the ODB) are as aware of the mess as you are. Rather
than accept the obvious like we do everyday, Belo and the rest of the ODB and
all the civic rah rah groups are organizing think groups to find out what is
good and bad in the city.
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Getting a read on Dallas:
Indicators
project Web site will offer data, help city tackle challenges
08:23 PM CST Sat,
3/20/04
by DAVE LEVINTHAL/The Dallas Morning News |
It's a look at Dallas' soul designed to reveal
why the nation's eighth-largest city works the way it does and how it can be
made better.
Two years in the making, the Dallas
Indicators project's Web site will be launched Tuesday by several city
foundations and corporations.
. . . "Good data
makes you ask good questions," says John Castle, chairman of the
Dallas Indicators steering committee. "And the right kinds of questions are
what lead to better decisions."
. . . The project primarily addresses 10 core
Dallas issues: civic health, culture and the arts, economics, education, the
environment, housing, health, crime and safety, technology and
transportation.
. . . Most of the information draws comparisons to
cities similar in size to Dallas, organizers say.
. . . "But this is a
project that doesn't have an agenda," said Mary Jalonick,
executive director of the Dallas Foundation, one of the Dallas Indicators
sponsors. . . . Mr. Castle: "Simply, it's the
democratization of data."
. . . Dallas Indicators coordinators include the
Dallas Foundation and the Foundation for Community Empowerment, in
association with the Boston Consulting Group, the Dallas Citizens Council
and Belo Corp., parent company of The Dallas Morning News.
. . . Though Dallas City Council members aren't
yet intimately familiar with the project, council member Veletta Forsythe
Lill said she eagerly awaits it. . . . Ms. Lill
said. "This region has been rather short on strategic planning."
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Must have been a slow news weekend because DMN had already run the above story
under a different title at 1:11 pm the same day.
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Web site will offer
data to help city tackle challenges
01:11 PM CST Sat, 3/20/04
By DAVE LEVINTHAL / The Dallas Morning News |
It's a look at Dallas' soul designed
to reveal why the nation's eighth-largest city works the way it does and how
it can be made better.
. . . "Good data makes you ask good questions,"
says John Castle,
. . . "But this is a project that doesn't have an
agenda," said Mary Jalonick,
. . . council member Veletta Forsythe Lill
said she eagerly awaits it. . . . Ms.
Lill said. "This region has been rather short on strategic planning."
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Then there were a couple of Boston is better stories on the same day:
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Dallas could learn from other successes, experts say:
Aggressive initiatives
helped several cities cut crime rates in the 1990s
09:27 PM CST Sat,
3/20/04 By
MARK WROLSTAD/The Dallas Morning News |
The crime rate backed off in Boston
during the 1990s.
In New York, too, and in San Diego
and Minneapolis and a host of cities where police tried aggressive new
initiatives.
But then, crime generally improved
across the country, even in places that didn't do anything different. Among
the explanations: the strong economy, the decline of crack and longer prison
terms.
"Nobody really has a good grip on
this," said Jeffrey Fagan, a law professor at Columbia University, who joked
that maybe Boston's ideas worked so well that crime declined elsewhere.
. . . Dallas would do well to heed the policing
choices there, which are "highly transferable ... with the right
leadership," said Paul Grogan, a civic leader and former Harvard official.
. . . Frank Hartmann, who runs Harvard's criminal
justice management program.
"You can't do everything," he said.
"You have to determine what your biggest problems are and really go after
them."
. . . George Kelling of Rutgers University, who
co-originated the "broken windows" theory that minor violations, such as
graffiti, foster a lawbreaking climate.
His prescription for 21st-century
policing:
? Problems are local, and an organization must be decentralized to respond
to them.
? Analyze those problems accurately so responses are on target.
? Supervisors must be held accountable to reach the department's goals.
Anti-crime initiatives that
worked one place may not work somewhere else, said Ronald Burns, a Texas
Christian University criminologist. Departments should start small.
. . . Dallas faces a particular problem as
an American crossroads, where many people are from another place and headed
somewhere else, said Alejandro del Carmen, a University of Texas at
Arlington criminologist.
"There's a lack of a sense of
community here," he said.
. . . Successful programs can't necessarily be
replicated, said James Alan Fox, a Northeastern University criminal justice
professor. . . . "Sometimes what you can't
copy are the people, the leadership in the police department, in the DA's
office and in the community." |
Apparently, Belo and the ODB have transferred their fixation from Atlanta to
Boston.
Dallas is not like any of the cities the ODB and Belo want us to emulate.
Our gang problems are not a bunch of local punks acting out against each other
and the rest of the local populations. Sure, we have local thugs in gangs,
but we also have gangs comprised of teenagers who are actually illegal aliens
from several different South American countries, not just Mexico. A 13
year old was stabbed to death at Cary Middle School (3 stab wound) by a 15 year
old sociopath who is an illegal immigrant from El Salvador. The 15 year
old illegal immigrant sociopath was out playing basketball the day after he
stabbed that child to death. He killed another human being and had
absolutely no remorse.
Do you think role playing would make that illegal immigrant sociopath feel
remorse or would have deterred him from stabbing that 13 year old for grins?
The only thing that could improve this city is for someone to explain
George
Kelling's "broken windows" theory
in one syllabic words to
our elected officials and the ODB who own them.
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When a neighborhood looks bad
(yards are trashy, houses in disrepair), bad guys think no one is watching
and move in to do their bad stuff. |
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When a park looks neglected
(scruffy landscaping, damaged equipment), bad guys think no one is watching
and move in to do their bad stuff. |
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When a city looks shabby like
Dallas does today, bad guys know this is the place to do their bad stuff. |
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Dallas has so many sex clubs and sex spas and other camouflaged prostitution
operations because the slave traders know our City Attorney and Mayor and
Council are reactive rather than proactive. Our Mayor, City Attorney, City
Manager and way too many of our experts at City Hall are tied up with Our
Mayor's Trinity Project instead of focusing on the quality of life for current
Dallas residents and taxpayers.
Everyone wants to talk about the future and do studies and/or copy programs that
may or may not have worked in other cities. We elected a Mayor who had a
vision of smooth streets, green parks and fair pay for our public safety
personnel.
Big ticket items will happen on their own merits if we keep our eye on improving
the quality of our lives on a human scale.
We don't need studies or a bunch of rah rah civic booster clubs combining their
resources for another "feel good" project. We need to deal with our real
problems REALISTICALLY and PRACTICALLY and IMMEDIATELY.
We could copy some things that make Ft. Worth so livable -- committing necessary
public monies to adequately fund our Zoo. With our Zoo connected to the
convention center by DART rail, that could be a very big draw for
conventioneers. New Orleans has huge crowds at their Aquarium and Zoo.
People in San Antonio take the bus from Downtown to their Zoo. Ft. Worth,
New Orleans and San Antonio spent money to make money, but they spent money on
facilities used by locals and tourists. They spent money to improve
facilities they already had. Dallas has never properly funded our Zoo or
our Aquarium.
The last thing we should do right now is spend money to acquire and construct
new parks, whether Downtown or anywhere else. We have wonderful parks that
are horribly neglected.
Hopefully, Jim Schutze is going to report in more detail about one city
councilman forcing the Park Board to do a number on a church in his district to
try to force them out of their location. In a blighted and crime-ridden
area, the Park Department is using imminent domain to take a key lot the church
has acquired for its expansion. The Park Department will construct a
"pocket park" on a single lot that will effectively kill the church's
construction project. That's going beyond neglect to outright assault, not
to mention the park will immediately become another place for drug dealers to
operate and will be off limits for neighborhood residents..
I don't know about you, but I'm not interested in anymore statistics or studies.
I want to feel safe. I want Webb Chapel to look as nice on the Dallas side
of LBJ as it does on the Farmers Branch side. I want Dallas parks to look
as nice as the parks I pass in Carrollton and Farmers Branch on my way to work.
No huge sports complexes, just open spaces with walking paths and swing sets and
bridges and pavilions.
I don't want statistics. I want consistent code enforcement. I want
businesses that get certificates of occupancy (CO's) from the city for one use
to be limited to that use. I want someone at City Hall inspecting
businesses on a regular basis for compliance with their CO. If you have a
restaurant CO, you must have a kitchen and serve food until an hour before
closing. If you have a "personal service" CO, your staff must all be
licensed to perform the "personal service" your business offers.
I don't want any more studies. I want us to maintain and enhance public
properties (parks, buildings, the Zoo) that we already own.
I don't want to compare Dallas to other cities, until we pay our police and
firefighters what their colleagues in those respective cities earn, or at least
what their colleagues in Grand Prairie are paid.
DallasArena.com has been offering the information needed to make this city a
better place for several years, but to rehash our position:
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We need to clean up our city
at the street level. |
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We need consistent code
enforcement and certain punishment for those who violate our city
ordinances. |
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We need to invest in our
existing parks and facilities to make them more attractive and where
possible revenue producing. |
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We need to pay our police and
firefighters more than any other city in the County, and Our Mayor needs to
stop treating them like sanitation workers. |
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When we get those four items
accomplished, we will already be on the road to solving the problems the rah rah
civic groups want to study.
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