The End Of Dialogue

If you look at my post of June 10, you’ll see that it elicited a strong response from Sergeant Ritchie. I am still a bit perplexed by this, as I do not believe that post was extremely critical of FWPD. All I did was to sort through the raw data and analyze how my neighborhood compares to the rest of the city. The results are more of a testament to the nature of my neighbors rather than of the behavior of the police. By my calculations it appears that, during the one year time period that I studied, there was about nine times as much reported police activity in my neighborhood as compared to the average Fort Wayne neighborhood.

Granted, that is not exactly the way I stated it though. What I actually said was that there was more crime (rather than just reported police activity) in my neighborhood. And to Sergeant Ritchie, it appears that my “misrepresenting” the facts was seen as a purposeful action on my part, intended to slander the hard work that FWPD is doing in my neighborhood. The only response I can make to that is that, logically, one would think these two activities (crime and police activity) would be very strongly correlated.

The very next day, I posted the other half of this story, which was to show that my neighborhood has settled down quite a bit in the past year. I do see that as a testament to the hard work of FWPD, and I thought I had indicated this on a previous post, but there too, Sergeant Ritchie took issue. In fact, this particular post is what my direct communications with Sergeant Ritchie had been moving me towards for quite some time.

Eventually, I will bring this blog to an end. But not before my goals have either been met or until I have pushed them to the point where I am forced to admit that they can’t be met, and not without giving some closing explanation. The dialoge which had existed between Sergeant Ritchie was actually compelling me to consider to stand down. I was getting very close to making a final statement saying something to the effect of “Although problems still exist, the dramatically improved situation now is even better than I hoped for when I first started this blog.”

And then, Chief Dumbfuck had to open his big mouth. There is certainly much cause for FWPD to receive recognition for the work they have been doing lately. I see the results not just here but in other areas of town where there is a lot of criminal activity. And I believe the police deserve a lot of credit for this. But to claim that the problem no longer exists, as Chief York’s idiotic statement did. Or to even imply that the problem never did exist, as some officers seem to do, is something that I find to be entirely unacceptable.

To understand why this bothers me so much, you only have to read a single newspaper story. A man walks past the corner of Suttenfield and Caroline (one block from my house), encounters a large group of people standing around, is offered and declines to buy drugs from them, gets told “Then get your punk ass off the block”, then is shot and nearly killed. And why did this happen? Only because he wandered into gangland, and offended one of the gang members. This single story epitomizes the conditions under which my neighborhood suffers much of the time, and it should make it clear that Chief York’s comments are patently false.

This is the way things have been for the entire time I have lived here. Granted, it has it’s quiet moments, but there is no better way to describe my neighborhood than to say that it is gang-controlled. Personally, this used to intimidate me quite a bit. There was a time when I was reluctant to wander on foot more than a couple houses away from my own, for fear that I would be seen as interfering with someone’s turf. But that wall came down the night they fire-bombed my house. It’s not that I now feel any safer it the neighborhood at large, it’s just that the illusion that remaining close to home would somehow protect me came to an end.

I’ve learned to take care of myself in this neighborhood. I walk to the store several blocks away and don’t worry when I pass by a group of drug dealers. This is because I am alert, and I am prepared for action (meaning that I am armed). But can you blame some of my older neighbors for not acting as nonchalant as I do? When they see these guys on the streets in front of their homes, selling drugs, often standing in large menacing looking groups, and on many occasions shooting at each other or setting people’s houses on fire. I think this alone would be enough to cause great concern for most people.

Then, when these old folks look out their windows and see the police at various times either ignoring these guys or palling around with them, it becomes alarming. And to further compound the problem, many of the police officers fail to properly differentiate between the criminals and the law abiding citizens here. The police sometime hold no reservations against meting out their aggressive tactics towards that same old lady who only the day before saw that officer standing on the corner, laughing and joking with the very same drug dealers who only the day before that were shooting at each other right beside her house.

So, the old lady gets stopped for driving through the alley on the way to her house, while the drug dealers often seem to get a free pass. What would you think? Although I have clearly stated that I no longer believe this is the case, and that is only because I have studied the situation intensely for the past three years, the observations that are gleaned from my neighborhood could easily lead one to speculate that the police are either afraid of these gangs, or are themselves actually the ones running the drugs here. And that is why Chief York’s idiotic comments are so insulting. We have a very serious gang problem in Fort Wayne, and the police department is a part of that problem.

But Sergeant Ritchie misconstrued my comments entirely. All I was doing in that post was pointing to the fact that crime is still very high in my neighborhood, while at the same time being sure to acknowledge the police for their role in greatly reducing it lately. Yet Sergeant Ritchie seemed to view this a s a baseless assault upon him and his officers. My response to Sergeant Ritchie on the blog tried to make a couple things clear. First of all, I blame the drug dealers, not the police, for instigating the problems here. And second, although I do take much issue with the improper way FWPD has dealt with the problem at times, I was clearly directing my current assault only at the top, to those people who would make such thoughtless statements as to claim that Fort Wayne does not have a gang problem.

So, I patiently awaited Sergeant Ritchie’s reply to this. I waited two weeks, and he made no reply. But my response was pretty harsh, so I decided to add another filler post to keep the blog active, while I continued waiting to allow him a fair chance to reply. Then, after waiting for two more weeks, I sent him a private e-mail. I just wanted to check and see if the channels of communication were still open, or if perhaps there was a reasonable explanation for a lack of response.

Sergeant Ritchie quickly responded to that e-mail, beginning with an explanation which in itself would have served to fully justify his apparent disconnect from the dialogue we had engaged in. But then, he went on to reply to something else I had said in my last e-mail, and that is what seemed to have finally pushed him over the edge. In that e-mail, I did nothing more than to try to make Sergeant Ritchie aware of a very serious problem in this neighborhood. This problem is one that his department is intimately connected to, and in fact has helped to create (although probably inadvertently.)

I told Sergeant Ritchie that I realized (for legal reasons) that he could probably not acknowledge that what I was saying actually was true, but I simply requested that he pass the information along to the appropriate persons within his department before the problem progressed further. I think I was doing the responsible thing by trying to communicate this information in private, but Sergeant Ritchie’s response made it clear that any comments which even slightly criticized his department would not be listened to by him.

Fair enough. I don’t have any right to demand that sergeant Ritchie listen to or talk with me. He wasn’t getting paid for the time he devoted to our dialogue, and he felt that it was no longer productive, so he was certainly within his rights to discontinue it. But the problem is, the department as a whole has already shown that they do not engage in real dialogue with citizens. Sure, they make public statements, but this is a one way dialogue, and it is often very far from honest.

So, per the actions of Sergeant Ritchie and of the people who run FWPD, I really have no choice now than to begin a full public assault against what I consider to be the real reason for the violent gang problems we are experiencing in Fort Wayne, which is ineffective leadership at FWPD. In my next post, I will try to briefly summarize the most salient points of my cause, and state what my goals are. And then, let the battle begin!