10 May 2008

Police Priorities - Working at 8 a.m. or 11 p.m.?

My drive to and from work is about 1.5 miles. In the morning I seem to see a police officer every other day (and if I don't see one while driving, one will pass me on Main Street as I'm grabbing coffee). There's serious police work to do at 8 a.m., I'm sure, certainly they're focusing on the serious crime in Newark. All these muggings obviously occur in the morning hours when productive citizens are rushing to work.

Contrast the mornings with my experience last night.

At 10:30 p.m. I went out running. My 5.5-mile run took me on such obscure and low-traffic streets as Elkton Road, Park Place, S College Ave, Cleveland Ave, Papermill Road, Hillside Road, and Apple Road. Streets that have never seen a mugging, certainly not between 10:30 and 11:30 at night. People should feel completely safe walking these roads alone. Obviously. Since I didn't see a single Newark police officer the entire hour while running.

The city council keeps approving more police officers to combat the crime problem. Too bad the police force doesn't care about assigning officers to work in a way that might actually do something about the crime problem.

2 comments:

richgilberto said...

That's really odd, because I tend to see cops all over the place, both UD and Newark, all the time to the point that I thought it was overkill.

newarkista said...

I think there's a fundamental difference between the student corridor on Main St (where the focus is really on alcohol violations, and police are highly visible) and elsewhere. I run pretty often well after dark, and the police presence off of "drinking corridor" streets is pretty universally unimpressive. On campus, the UD police are around - but most of my running is off-campus (while still on major streets). And it's the day/night dichotomy that really gets to me and points to what the Newark PD really cares about.