The recent wave of shootings in Allentown continues to generate response. Hasshan Batts, who recommends that government generously fund his Promise Neighborhood organization, led a march in center city. Ed White, political strategist, recommends that the city start a new Department Of Youth. He claims that such a department could be funded by finding waste in the existing city budget, and grants. By coincidence, his favored candidate for city council has experience in the grant sector, and will look for the money, if he wins the seat or not. As mentioned in my previous post, councilman Courtney Robinson thinks that we should inventory our existing youth associated services. I would like to elaborate on that approach.
The last thing this city government needs is another department. Although the shootings evoke a woke reaction, and such violence is newish to Allentown, it's a long standing chronic urban condition. For a city which just assessed a 27% tax increase, I certainly hope that the budget was scrutinized for waste. I certainly hope that all city departments are seeking any available grants. Allentown already has extensive youth programs conducted by the department of Parks and Recreation. Under the previous administration, several new positions were created to assist the mayor. Certainly one of these positions could be utilized to include outreach and coordination of available options for youth.
Allentown cannot approach one problem by complicating another, homeowners are maxed out already.
image from West Side Story
Agree with the post 100%. Allentown doesn't need more programs. It could, however, better run the ones that exist.
ReplyDeleteThe city's youth leagues were decimated during Pawlowski's tenure. It would seem that focusing on rebuilding those would serve the dual purpose of giving youth something to do and (hopefully) involving parents in what's going on in their neighborhood.
I'm going to beg forgiveness and go slightly off topic here.
ReplyDeleteOver the weekend, a 10-year-old was shot inside Coca-Cola Park – on the actual ballfield – just prior to an Iron Pigs game. While nobody initially knew the boy was shot, an x-ray at the hospital revealed a bullet in the boy's leg.
The discovery that the boy had been shot came an inning or two into the ball game. Amazingly, neither the Iron Pigs nor the Allentown Police Department did anything to lockdown and/or clear the stadium.
In a hastily-revised article by the Morning Call, Iron Pigs GM Kurt Landes and co-owner Joe Finley were quick to state that the bullet most likely came from outside the stadium by someone indiscriminately shooting into the air.
This raises a few questions/observations:
1) Why wasn't the stadium evacuated once it was discovered that the boy was a victim of a shooting. Doesn't the safety of the other spectators (and the players) matter as much as making sure the Iron Pigs generate maximum revenue on a game night?
2) Who made the decision to continue with the game? Surely the APD could not have already completed their investigation, and likely couldn't even begin it since a baseball game was being played on the crime scene. Yet somehow both the Iron Pigs and the APD allowed the game to continue. This is an amazing contrast to the response a few weeks ago in Bethlehem, when an UNARMED man climbed into unauthorized areas on the Steel Stacks property and Bethlehem police canceled events and cordoned off the area out of concerns for the patrons there.
3) Why does the Morning Call accept the word of people with a vested interest in the narrative (Landes and Finley) dictate the facts of the story? The revised story had a lot of quotes from Finley and Landes about what the APD said it could be, but virtually nothing from the APD itself. The Iron Pigs advertise in the Call and the Call has been a big cheerleader for the team. Given the role the Call had (and the results it lead to) after being a decade-long cheerleader for Ed Pawlowski and slanting stories in his favor, it would appear that the Morning Call has learned nothing from how that experience turned out.
4) Even if the investigation concludes that the bullet did come from outside the stadium, there is the far larger question of whether it was just random or deliberately fired. I am not a great believer in random events, and think it is far more likely that (if the shot indeed came from outside the stadium) somebody shot at the stadium deliberately. I’m not saying they were aiming at the boy who got shot, but that the stadium and ANY of its patrons would have been the target.
I know that’s a narrative that the Iron Pigs won’t want to discuss. But I’d like to believe that City Hall, the APD, and the Morning Call will put the public’s safety first in this case, or at least on an equal footing with the team’s profits.
We deserve honest answers about what happened on Saturday night. So far, we’re not getting them.
At what time did the x ray at the hospital reveal the bullet ? inning ?
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