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News :: Miscellaneous |
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War On The Underclass In Champaign |
Current rating: 0 |
by Mike Lehman
(No verified email address) |
14 Mar 2001
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Sunday’s Champaign News-Gazette (March 11, 2001) carried a front page feature on a supposed surge in crime in the downtown area around the TIMES homeless shelter since it opened a year ago. It served to frame complaints that a proposed Methadone and needle exchange clinic in the same area would be a burden on the local neighborhood residents and businesses. |
Left out of the discussion was the News-Gazette’s role in the location of the TIMES shelter at Washington and Market Streets, where it was constructed to replace the old shelter that was located in the basement of the McKinley Foundation near the UI campus. The new shelter had originally been proposed as a remodel of the old Shelby Dodge building on South Neil Street. Front page articles then carried the complaints of a politically-connected local landlord that a shelter at that location would hurt his properties in that area. So the TIMES Center was constructed at its current location and opened a year ago, over the objections of local residents. They simply didn’t have the pull of the big landlord from South Neil.
The problem is that many people in our community need the services of the TIMES Center. The proposed methadone clinic would help local addicts kick the habit without having to travel on a three- or four-time a week basis to Kankakee or Decatur, as about 50 area residents currently do. Locating the clinic near the TIMES Center makes a lot of sense, as it would be near the population it would serve. Such a clinic would be far more effective in alleviating crime and the other ill-effects of drugs in Champaign than any investment in new armored cars for the SWAT team.
The article also misrepresented the alleged increase in crime in the downtown area since the TIMES Center opened. A map of downtown crime reporting areas was adorned with figures for crime, broken down by the years of 1998, 1999 (before TIMES Center opened), and 2000 (after TIMES Center opened.) If you read the article, you would think that this data supports the alarmist conclusion of the article that there is a crime wave in the downtown area, caused by the opening of TIMES Center last year.
Simply adding up the figures for a total downtown crime figure for each year tells a different story. The total crimes reported in 1998 was 695, for 1999 it was 600, and for 2000 it was 692. So crime was actually higher in 1998 than last year (2000) after the TIMES Center opened. With swings in total crime like this, it would appear that the statistics simply reflect year-to-year variations, rather than any sort of alleged homeless-caused crime wave.
While the News-Gazette should carry stories about Not-In-My-Back-Yard syndrome-affected local residents, it should also tell the whole story about why things are located where they are today. Because Champaign city government is attached at the hip to politically connected business people and developers, urged on by a similarly well-connected News-Gazette, the opinion of ordinary citizens is drowned out by the amplified chorus of money at City Hall. |
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Crime & Drugs |
by Nancy Dietrich-Rybicki
nancydietrich (nospam) juno.com (unverified) |
Current rating: 0
15 Mar 2001
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Great commentary, Mike. I would also like to add a personal rant: it seems like the only answer we have to the problem of higher crime is, like you said, to increase the # of armored cars & SWAT Team budgets. I have read that it would be much more cost-efficient to build & staff more drug treatment centers than to continue warehousing drug addicts in jail. Instead of moving crime to different areas (if this is really happening), this would probably lower crime rates & keep more people in mainstream society. "Prevention" and "treatment" are 2 words that do not seem to be in many public policy vocabularies. |
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Cali Prop 36 (?) |
by Jon Coit
coit (nospam) uiuc.edu (unverified) |
Current rating: 0
04 Apr 2001
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That's exactly what the California Legislature's own budget office found in their analysis of Prop 36, which while not decriminalizing drugs, nevertheless substitutes treatment in state-funded and licensed, community-based treatment facilities for incarceration as the default penalty for people convicted of drug possession only. They concluded that the plan would save literally hundreds of millions of dollars, and since it passed we can all see how effective it will be at dealing with people who have drug problems. |
