Last Thursday afternoon I was sitting at the corner of 17th Avenue West and Tamiani Trail (AKA 14th St. West), waiting in the left turn lane for the light to change. There was a police car sitting in the closed gas station across the street and another one two cars behind me in the left turn lane. An old Chevrolet Celebrity passed me on the right, boom-boom obscenties vibrating from its open windows. Without stopping for the red light, the Celebrity’s driver made a screeching right turn from 17th Avenue onto Tamiami Trail. Neither of the cops did a thing. This in itself is sad, but even worse is that this young driver didn’t bother to moderate his stereo volume or aggressive driving even though he was in full view of two police cars. Bradenton police obviously don’t scare him. They scare me, though, because this level of non-policing is one of the biggest problems keeping my neighborhood from becoming the prosperous, arts-oriented “urban village” Bradenton’s Tamiami Tomorrow program is trying to build.

I’ve attended several public meetings held by groups that are trying to improve this neighborhood. Residents and business owners have complained about high crime and poor policing at every one of them, but the few times I’ve noticed uniformed police at these meetings they sat apart from the crowd, faces blank, and didn’t react to the criticism aimed at them. It was as if they didn’t care in the least what anyone thought of them either as individuals or as members of the Bradenton Police Department.

One time I approached a pair of these off-to-the-side officers, introduced myself, and asked what I could do to help them clean up my neighborhood. “Call and keep calling,” one of them said. “Set up a nighborhood watch.”

“Yeah, but neighborhood watch groups there never last long,” the other cop chimed in. “They start and peter out.” And they both laughed derisively, as if the lack of a strong neighborhood watch was an indication that my neighborhood didn’t deserve their attention.

Okay, laughing cops. It sounds like you want me to do the patrolling for you. No problem, as long as I get to pick up your paychecks, too. That would be even funnier than a citizen expecting you to do your job, wouldn’t it?

My wife and I are doing our part to help improve Bradenton by rehabilitating a broken-down duplex and turning part of it into gallery space where Debbie can sell her handicrafts and paintings, and another section into an office for me. This is more than a home to us. It’s also where we work — and it’s where I control more than $250,000 in local editorial payroll and freelance budget for OSTG, the online publishing company for which I’ve worked since 1998.

We’re probably more valuable to the city trying to make our little corner into a center of economic activity than doing the police department’s job. We’re not saying cops here have it easy. We sympathize with them. Debbie was a Baltimore cop for a while and walked a foot beat in a neighborhood rougher than any in Bradenton, though, so police who sit in air conditioned cars and wait for calls don’t impress her. I’ve been in the Army and driven a cab in Baltimore — jobs far riskier than being on the Bradenton police force — so I’m only a little easier to impress. But we’re not overly demanding, either. If we saw evidence of consistently proactive, community-oriented policing around here, we would happily shower the officers doing it with praise — and ask the mayor and city council to raise police salaries, too.

A police department whose members witness illegal acts without doing anything about them is one that condones crime. It is a department no one respects. It is one whose members sit apart from citizens in public meetings because they know they are going to hear nothing but complaints and they have no satisfactory answers for them. It is a department in need of a major change in attitude, and it is going to get that change of attitude imposed from outside because rich, politically-connected developers are starting to pour money into downtown Bradenton and the Tamiami Trail corridor, and those developers are not going to let their investments tank because of poor law enforcement.

Here are Bradenton’s crime stats from 2002. While these numbers aren’t as bad as the ones for Washington, D.C., where Bradenton police chief Michael Radzilowski worked before he came here, we’re well above the national average in almost every crime category. You’d better believe that people who make major real estate investments can find those statistics just as fast as I can, and that those numbers are going to scare off a lot of money that could help improve this town.

So forget me personally, laughing cops. Think of the money. If you get your act together and start cleaning up this town, it’ll have more development and a higher tax base, which means more money for police raises.

Better yet, since lawbreakers notoriously flee strict jurisdictions for softer ones, you will have less crime to fight once you start arresting or ticketing (or at least warning) people you see commiting crimes or traffic violations instead of sitting passively behind your tinted car windows, waiting for calls.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 10th, 2005 at 5:26 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.