Years ago, a horrendous man-made disaster affected the area. In the aftermath, insurance rates rose, along with uncertainty and frustration. The entire country was impacted in some way. Even so, the rest of America hardly realizes the strategic and economic importance of this city, as it is home to one of the busiest seaports in the country.
Now, however, after a weekend of violent shootings, the national media is reporting that things are coming to a head for the embattled mayor:
NEW[City], Aug. 6 — As a weekend of bloodshed gave way to a day of mourning, the... public battering [was] beginning to take a toll on [the Mayor].... A group of protesters on the steps of City Hall were calling for his resignation, while a large huddle of reporters down the street waited with unanswerable questions about Saturday night’s fatal shooting of three [people].
...
[The Mayor] finds himself blamed for everything that is wrong with [the state's] largest city... after galloping into City Hall on a promise to change the political climate.... [the Mayor] finds himself at the nadir of his tenure, battling a homicide rate that refuses to yield and a growing tide of public hostility.
...
It is worth noting that [the Mayor] held his news conference in the Police Department’s operations center, where 32 wireless surveillance cameras, installed two months ago, keep an eye on some of the city’s most lawless neighborhoods. But the new equipment and a strategic overhaul of the department have not reduced the steady drumbeat of killings.
...
Then there was the [controversial speech].... [What the Mayor] intended as an affectionate tribute... was viewed as disparaging.
For both his enemies and his supporters, the episode seemed to crystallize a widespread sentiment here that [the Mayor]... is not entirely attuned to the culture and sensitivities of his constituents. [The Mayor] has apologized for the speech, but many are still feeling wounded.
...
[A] small group of protesters... were ostensibly seeking an end to the senseless violence. But despite the placards calling for peace and unity, most at the rally outside City Hall on Monday were demanding the mayor’s ouster.
“He totally disrespects us,” said... a frequent critic of the mayor, screaming into a megaphone.
...
[The Mayor] has long waved away such critics, saying they are surrogates for his political opponents or that they are seeking City Hall jobs that would buy their quiescence. Many of them, he points out, traffic in outlandish stories about the mayor.
“We have to use this as a pulling together, not a ripping apart,” he said about those using the killings to call for his resignation.
This all sounds eerily similar. Might this be an article about New Orleans and Mayor Nagin?
No, silly. Read the rest and you'll see where the similarities end:
But [the Mayor] has clearly been rattled by the recent violence, and by the rising tide of people expressing disappointment in him. He said on Monday that he had not slept in 48 hours. On Monday morning, he returned to the scene of the shootings to speak to hundreds of children at a summer program at the Mount Vernon School, promising the students that such a brutal crime would not happen again.
and
Moments before [the Mayor] was to step in front of the cameras, a mayoral aide noticed two middle-aged women and a man sitting silently among the crowd — relatives of... one of the shooting victims. Officials quickly ushered them to a back room to meet [the Mayor], who offered his condolences and promised that the police would stop at nothing to find the killers.
...
Although [the Mayor's police director] frequently tries to remind the public that shootings are down 80 percent and that every other category of crime has dropped, Newark is just three body bags away from the 63 homicides tallied at this time last year, the highest in a decade.
Instead of losing sleep for days after a brutal violent crime and promising that the killers will be found and no more such crimes will occur... OUR MAYOR forms a consultantocracy to do his job for him while he goes on unannounced fundraising junkets so he can consider running a vanity campaign for Governor rather than running a city that desperately needs safe streets (not to mention cranes in the sky and explosives in the pie).
In case you didn't catch it, New Orleans and Newark have about the same population but Newark has 60 homicides so far this year, while New Orleans has about double that amount.
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Update: Already, there's a possible break in the Newark murder case.
