So if you haven’t read my column this week, which you can find here, I should say first that I’m not actually running for Birmingham mayor. Rather, the question I want to work through, with some help from readers, is what would be the perfect campaign platform if I did? In my column I call it the political version of fantasy football. This is an experiment in political journalism, and I’m hoping you eager readers will help make it successful.
During the next week or so here, I will write daily mini columns on various issues facing the city. My hope is that these little manifestos will start a larger discussion. Readers can critique what I’ve written and contribute your own ideas about politics and public policy in Birmingham. This should be a collaborative effort, with some sort of synthesis at the end. When we’re done we should have a People’s Platform — a kind of touchstone for the mayoral candidates.
Here is what to keep in mind: The fundamental problem in Birmingham is that it is a city with limited resources, and the overarching effect is that people are leaving the city in droves. How do we work within the former to solve the latter?
I’ve broken down the issues to these: Neighborhood Redevelopment, Education, Reconfiguring Government, Transportation, Crime, Homelessness, Econcomic Development and Environment. Again, these are just for starters, and we can add more or adjust some as we go.
Doing this on the blog offers some editorial liberties we don’t have in the regular print paper. Many of the issues I intend to address are sorted arbitrarily and they can’t be so easily untangled. For instance, education is a key component to neighborhood redevelopment, as is crime. Addressing the homeless problem downtown is part of economic development, and restructuring the city government will play key roles in education and transportation. This medium will allow us to tease these issues apart (with the individual posts) while preserving the interconnections (with hyperlinks). I’m looking forward to writing with this new dimension.
— Kyle Whitmire
Popularity: 4% [?]
August 23rd, 2007 at 8:27 pm
Darn it! I was hoping you were serious. Love the slogan.
August 24th, 2007 at 5:42 pm
Personally I would like to see a mayoral candidate take serious focus on the topic of Environment.
I would be very interested to have the issue of Air Quality addressed.
Why doesn’t the City take this issue seriously? Air is one of the basic necessities of life. Try holding your breath and tell me that it isn’t…
August 25th, 2007 at 8:17 pm
According to the US Justice Department, more than 60% of offenders arrested in Jefferson County test positive for drugs. This is consistent with national studies that find two-thirds of crime is drug related.
Provide free drug abuse treatment to any addict who needs it and you will see a drop in crime in the City of Birmingham. Our current policy is to wait for addicts to commit crimes, and then to send them to treatment ( if we can find a treatment bed) or to prison. At the same time, we have long waiting lists for addicts who are willing to come to treatment voluntarily. Many of those who are forced to wait for treatment will give up and return to committing crime.
A study by the RAND corporation found that every dollar invested in drug abuse treatment will return seven dollars in reduced costs to the communty including reduced crime, child abuse, etc. Expanding access to treatment will not only reduce the misery of addiction for the addicts and their families, it will also make Birmingham safer at a much lower cost than other options.
August 26th, 2007 at 12:30 pm
First of all I’m glad that you are going to tackle the issues on here. Second, Mayor Kincade must go. Kincade is the problem. Here me out. Kincade has done nothing for neighborhood redevelopment. If it wasn’t for the business leaders in town there will not have been growth on the Southside. Thank God for Southside, because without that part of town Birmingham would have been gone already. But, we still have a chance to turn this around. I lived in Charlotte and Nashville for a couple of years and those cities had the same problem. They actually elected people who care about the city and that person implimented programs that helped those cities grow. Birmingham can also do the same. We shouldn’t elect anyone off the city council because they are part of the “Do Nothing” administration. Valerie Abbott is just like Kincade she is not progressive and she was also against the firefighters and police officers raises. Langford cannot be trusted, read the recent news. I logged onto Patrick Cooper’s website and read his ideas and I really believe it will work. I’m a city employee and we can impliment his ideas. I googled Patrick Coopers name and his website appeared. The other candidates do not have websites, and they think we believe they can take us to the future, they don’t have websites what is this the 70’s. Kincade’s motto is moving the city forward honestly. Give me a break, we are moving backwards, and probably dishonestly. It’s time for change. Let’s move forward.
August 27th, 2007 at 8:03 pm
Kyle,
Hey, why stop with fingerprinting and photographing the working poor? Let’s go all the way!
To get the rest of the working poor, let’s fingerprint and photograph anyone riding a MAX bus. I mean, if poverty drives crime, wouldn’t the poor people riding the bus be a logical place to begin? Whether they’ve actually done anything wrong or not, they’ll know we’ve got our eyes on them and would think twice about committing a crime. We should also start fingerprinting patrons (not in the sense of “rich patrons-of-the arts-types,” silly) of the public libraries so that anyone with overdue books could be tracked down and fined.
The banks are already fingerprinting people who don’t have checking accounts, so we just need to get the banks to start turning those records over to the police department. Although, perhaps they should start getting the other nine fingerprints as well. Besides, I think the Feds have the banks surreptitiously turning over private financial records already.
Letting the police randomly search homes without a warrant would surely lead to more criminal activity being discovered and prosecuted. If a plausible pretext is needed, just train police officers in that new-fangled “science” of “micro-expression recognition” that they’re testing out in some airports. That way, if an officer spots a suspicious “micro-expression” on somebody’s face as they enter their own aparment, the officer will be justified in following the suspect into his or her home to conduct a search. Just think how many pot busts this could lead to in the Southside alone!
Next up, so-called “privileged” and confidential records. As Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems said years ago: “Privacy is dead, deal with it.” No one really expects their private matters to stay private anymore, what with all the wholesale selling of databases and identity theft and such. So, let’s just do away with the whole silly notion of privacy. Confidential medical and banking records? If you ain’t got nothing to hide, why worry? Attorney-client privilege? If you get arrested, you’re probably guilty anyway. Anonymous news sources, whistleblowers? Be a man and identify yourself publicly. The word “privacy” does not even appear in the U.S. Constitution. Privacy is dead, so let’s just bury it and move on.
Also, I propose that the police take DNA samples of all citizens residing in, or near, the City of Birmingham. Not only would it make it easier to find the guilty person to arrest for major crimes, we could also more easily identify the perpetrators of minor crimes such as hocking loogies on public sidewalks. That’d help clean up the dirty sidewalks here in 5 PTS South!
I’m not singling out adults here, though. Let’s take fingerprints, photographs and DNA samples of every school-age child in this city. Some, if not many, of these kids will grow up to swell the ranks of the criminal element already running amok in this community. Some of them are not even waiting to grow up to begin their crime sprees. Look at those two boys in McMinnville that just got off, for instance. “Boundary education” my posterior maximus! If any kids try any of that crap around here, we can collect and match the DNA from the victims’ bottoms and throw ‘em in the slammer! BONUS: We can use that computer-aging technique to find out what they’ll look like when they grow up. That would allow us to use those pictures to identify the ones with that “shady” look about them and flag them for special scrutiny.
Finally–and this is a bit more controversial–I want our police officers trained to detect and arrest criminals BEFORE they commit a crime. The Birmingham Police Department can start a pre-crime division like in the movie “Minority Report.” (Actually, that’s the perfect name for it because I’ve got a funny feeling it would be mostly minorities being reported.) People who engage in suspicious behavior could be put on “pre-crime probation” and put away before their first crime occurs. No need to wait for three strikes when we can send them packing in the warm-up circle!
Oh, and it goes without saying that homosexuals and Jews like myself should be fingerprinted and photographed immediately.
I know none of my suggestions directly address the violent crime/homicide problem that plagues this city, but then again, neither did yours. However, if most everyone is in jail, then won’t the crime rate eventually go down by default? Now, maybe we couldn’t get away with doing any of this stuff to terror suspects or illegal immigrants, but we’re not talking about doing it to them. What we are talking about is doing it to our friends and neighbors (at least, to the poorer ones…well, not really our neighbors so much as fellow citizens that can’t afford to live in our gated communites), and THAT we can get away with!
You say “Let’s Do Someone.” Damn right!
August 27th, 2007 at 9:44 pm
Pat, I’m sorry, but you’re overreacting. If a third party cashes a check at most banks in town, they ask for a thumb print. I’m usually on the other side of the privacy issue, but this time, seriously — if you aren’t fencing stolen goods, then what’s the big deal?
So where is the the line, really? Is it too much to ask for an address? A phone number? Is asking for a name an invasion of privacy?
Beyond the pawn shops, where this practice really needs to be in place is with scrap dealers. There are neighborhoods in town, Norwood in particular, that can’t redevelop because of copper theft.
If you have a point to make, then make it. Otherwise, let’s keep the invective out of this.