May. 27, 2008 at 14:35
by BrendaBee
Is it in the water? Is it in the air? Or is stupidity just highly contagious?
In the Local section of today's N&R two articles got my attention. On p[age B2 above the fold Headlines: Gas Prices put police on new wheels. It seems the city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is putting police officers on bicycles in order to save money now that the price of gas has gone so high and threatens to go much higher. In fact many cities are turning to or returning to bike patrols in these times of higher gas prices, higher all over prices and tightened city budgets. Greensboro has according to the N&R about 10 officer bikers that are used mainly downtown. It is proven that beside saving money the Bike Patrols are much better for community policing because bikes can go just about anywhere whereas the patrol car is limited to streets.
Bike Patrols are not a novel idea and have always been around to some degree. They became especially popular and their effectiveness was proven in the 1980's and 1990's. Then for some reason they went out of style. Some have claimed it was because the police officers themselves disliked being on a bike because of their exposure and the safety hazard of being on the streets with autos.
Now here is where the water, the air or the highly contagious comes in. On page B1 above the fold is the headline: Offer may help mount horse patrol. It seems the Downtown Greensboro. Inc is willing to chip in $25,000 a year to set up and maintain a mounted patrol for down town. (Downtown Greensboro Inc. is the downtown municipal taxing area where the people living in the area or in this case having businesses in the area have agreed to tax themselves for specific improvements they want for their area. The tax is collected with the property taxes and spent by the city exclusively on downtown projects the MTU asks for.)
It seems Fayetteville has a mounted patrol and got our city fathers all excited about the idea. Greensboro invited the Fayetteville Mounted Patrol over to demonstrate the patrols effectiveness even being able to catch speeders. (Yep! I'm sure any horse out there can catch any automobile with four flat tires any day of the week. Now four inflated tires just may make a big difference.)
So the idea was looked at and shelved for a very good reason: mounted patrols are not cheap! The $25,000 the Downtown group is willing to cough up even yearly won't come near even helping with the costs of maintaining the patrol. There is the usual costs for stable, food, hay, veterinary bills and officer training. Then there is the costs of land to put these stables and corals on which will be somewhere out in the country because no inner city neighborhood is going to allow a smelly stables in their area. This will make transporting the horses to where they will be used an expense (gasoline at $4+ a gallon.) And these are just the minor expenses, as the huge expense is the horses themselves. They must be very highly trained animals to be safe to use in noisy crowds of people pushing up against them and sometimes even poking at them or loud noises such as autos backfiring or horns or even gun shots without the horse reacting in any way until given a signal by the rider. (The rider must also be highly trained.) And these very highly trained horse do not come cheap. The $25,000 wouldn't come close to purchasing one horse I am sorry to say. Google police patrol horses and check out the prices. And other more pungent costs (or maybe not).
Now since we have established that $25,000 won't be much more than a drop in the proverbial bucket just what might the costs be and where will our city fathers get it? Mitch Johnson, albeit not the most reliable source for anything, says the city estimates it might take up to $250,000 to set up. No figures were given in this news report for yearly upkeep.
And where is the money for this set up to come from? Well Johnson claims the city will use the federal forfeiture funds. That's money made when the assets confiscated during drug investigations. Now far be from me to put a damper on this source of money, but it is hoped that the amount of forfeiture funds will decline from year to year as the GPD (in regular squad cars) makes some headway in eliminating the very active and well organized drug scene in Greensboro. Then again given our city fathers mentality it might be that they plan to maintain the drug industry in Greensboro in order to maintain the Mounted Patrol for downtown Greensboro. Ya think?
People, here we are as a nation (perhaps world) hovering on a deep recession heading for a depression as prices of just about everything continues to climb at alarming rates, the voters in Guilford County just passed a huge bond debt, 250,000 of us in Greensboro are being made to pay thru the nose to keep 1000 of us from smelling our garbage even when they built their home next to an already operating landfill, city and county taxes have gone up for the past five years with no let up for property owners to be seen any year soon and we are now considering the possibility of giving our downtown a fancy spancy mounted patrol for the weekends and special events when crowds gather.
I think it is about time for the saner individuals in Greensboro ( all 2 dozen of us) to demand that the city fathers and elected officials and special interest groups be made to stop drinking the water, stop breathing the air and all of them most especially should be made to quarantine themselves in their homes. BB
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May. 24, 2008 at 03:22
by BrendaBee
Have the suing renegade cops gone too far finally in their greed? YES! GPD Police Officers Julius Fulmore and Brian James are suing the Rhino Times, Hammer Publications, John and William Hammer, and Jerry Bledsoe for defamation. Defamation of their dubious character no less in the publication of the expose series of articles by Jerry Bledsoe and published in the Rhino Times as "Cops in Black and White" Now this is "Comedy in Black and White"!
One really gets a kick out of this coming on the heels of the announcement by Chief Bellemy that not 50 boxes of vital information on the 1979 incident, but only 5 to 10 of newspaper clippings were thrown out in 2001 or 2002. He of course didn't mention that Fulmore was a liar and an instigator and had cost the police department big bucks to investigate these allegations. Nor was it mentioned that the Pulpit Forum members who made these false allegations following Fulmore's lying tip and the NC State NAACP who wrote to the FBI demanding an investigation into this outrage have been made to look like the fools they undoubtedly are. No this wasn't mentioned and we can be sure it will be ignored as if it never happened by the Pulpit Forum and the NAACP with no apologies for what they have done as this is the usual method of operation with these people. And the whole incident will be swept under the rug by the GPD and of course the Greensboro City Council. After all no harm was done except to waste more of the tax payers money, and that certainly is no big deal.
With all the opposition by the status quo seekers and the City Council to the Bledsoe series and the information it has revealed about the GPD I am sure the Hammer Brothers are ecstatic over this opportunity to get these two GPD police officers and many more involved "witnesses" on the witness stand under oath to "tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth so help me God".
Might this be the beginning of the end? The final chapter in the Bledsoe series "Cops in Black and White"? I am surprised no savvy lawyers stopped these two before they could get to this point. Surely no one believed the Hammers would cave in and pay off without going to court like the City Council is doing.
I just wish it could all be televised. Here Greensboro has been treated to its own little "Peyton Place" drama for over two years and will be deprived of viewing the outcome of all the lying, cheating, sex, drugs, scandal, racial pandering and greed that has taken place within it's city limits. Now that is sad; really, really sad. BB
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Apr. 10, 2008 at 13:25
by BrendaBee
Thesaurus Search for Screw-up:
incompetent
useless
amateurish
Bungling
Ham-fisted
Mitch Johnson
GPD under Tim Bellamy
It seems never a week goes by that we are not appraised of another embarrassment from our city police department. Officers suspended for accusations of sexual assault, not reporting opening a business, embezzlement, lying, consorting with a known prostitute(s), and on and on. What do most of these have in common? Well first and foremost, most are suspensions WITH pay, which is a more politic way of saying a paid holiday. Some police officers have been suspended with pay for almost a year. The second commonality is that many of these names we, the public, have heard or read in our newspapers and on TV before for some type of unsavory if not criminal behavior. Now considering that North Carolina is a fire at will state the first question to come to my mind at least is : why haven’t these people been fired?
Today’s N&R has two stories in it. The first has made the national news. It seems a 78 year old man was quietly standing in the medium strip outside of the Coliseum where he had been told to stand to hold up signs supporting our troops in Iraq and elsewhere in the world. It seems that one of the GPD ‘s finest after riding by several times saw the old man talking to a reporter and decided it was time to make the senior citizen move on. The officer stopped to tel;l the old man to move on then turned to walk away. Well like a good many elderly people Pop Kohanowich has a hearing problem and had been distracted talking to the reporter so he failed to hear the officer. Remember he had been told by another officer to stand in the medium so he had no idea that this would be a violation. The police officer having made his demand and turned away caused Pop to touch his left shoulder to get the officer's attention to ask him to repeat what he had said.
Well what in the world could we expect from this much younger and presumably in good health police officer to do except to assume he was being attacked by a raging 78 year old bull and to go on the defense? So he flipped the old man to the ground and cuffed him. Then a group of our best and bravest arrested the “raging 78 year old bull” for assault and took him to jail. It makes one proud that our fair city is defended by such valiant warriors, doesn’t it?
The next article had to do with shootings. That is putting bullet holes thru people standing on our streets. So far in 2008 there have been 27. This is almost twice the 15 in 2007 but down from the 22 of 2006. It is however almost three times the 10 of 2005. Would anyone venture to guess who the Police Chief was in 2005? And would anyone care to speculate how it happened that in 2005 the homicide rate in Greensboro was only 15, and that it was the first time since 1983 the homicide count was in the teens? (For those of you with poor memories 2005 was the first full year David Wray was Police Chief. This was the police Chief whom our City Manager Mitchy Johnson had lost so much faith in that he forced Wray to resign in January 2006). It certainly speaks for our City Manager, whom our past and present City Councils have so much respect for, that he can now tell us with a straight face what a good police chief Tim Bellamy is.
So once again I beat a tired old horse that I have been beating for over a year as the only reasonable solution to this problem with the Greensboro Police Department:
My recommendation to clean up the GPD and get the police protection we people of Greensboro need:
1. Make the office of Chief of Police an elective office so he/she is answerable to the people every 4 or 6 years and not to a group of politicians, city employees or city movers and shakers who operate behind the scenes. Sheriff Barnes and the Guilford County police don't seem to be having all these problems.
2. In order to get and retain better qualified police officers have all law enforcement wannabes trained in one or several of the many fine schools in our area. All other professions that I am familiar with require the people wanting to practice in that profession pay for their own schooling and this should also be the case with police training. If people want to practice a certain profession enough to pay for the training you can presume better qualified people will do so. Instead Greensboro accepts applicants and trains then with pay for the 18 months before they are certified. Doctors, teachers and plumbers do not get paid for training let alone overtime pay as do the GPD trainees. People in other occupations are hired and given a probationary period of several years before becoming permanent members of the staff. A probationary period that tends to weed out those who are not suited or qualified for the job.
Since so much is invested in police officers training when they get thru training it is apparently felt that nothing short of having an officer commit murder is grounds for firing, and yet only out on the mean streets do the officers truly show their abilities as police officers able to deal with people and the problems they encounter. No amount of training can substitute for the streets. Wray fired Stacy Morton for committing a serious breach of police behavior when he assaulted a cuffed and restrained prisoner. City Manager Mitch Johnson who is so much more qualified in police matters than Wray made Wray rescind his order and reinstate this person who is obviously unqualified and violent. (see Bill Knight’s blog on David Wray’s achievements.)
Oh, and other occupations also require their people to take continuing education training at their own expense. This training would be eligible for the federal Pell Grant so the argument that the inability to pay for their schooling if it were privatized doesn't hold up. BB
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Feb. 28, 2008 at 23:29
by BrendaBee
Doug Clark of the N&R is the ONLY member of the staff other than a few feature writers whom I personally have any respect for. John Robinson and Allen Johnson should be flushed, and I certainly hope when FOX takes over they will be. So it was no surprise to me when after the flap made by the N&R over The Pulpit Forums latest insanity it was Doug alone who called it right with today's blog post.
Doug said, "The story of the mystery police files doesn't make sense to me. It doesn't make sense that there could have been 50 boxes of previously unknown files related to the 1979 Klan/Nazi/CWP shootout hidden away in the police department for 25 years. It doesn't make sense that, when the Truth & Reconciliation Commission asked for records, someone at the PD decided to trash these shadowy files. If the 50 boxes had been successfully hidden for 25 years, seems like they could have been hidden forever."
My response:
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Jan. 11, 2008 at 10:08
by BrendaBee
Excerpt from YES!WEEKLY post dated January 11, 2008 as follows:
“….Holder, along with Brenda Bowers objects to my use of the term “retraction” to describe the post-script provided by lawyer Walt Jones and published by The Rhinoceros Times concerning Officer Stacy Morton’s disciplinary case. This is a matter of semantics. I leave it to readers to draw their own conclusions about the truth of Morton’s case by examining Bledsoe’s initial account juxtaposed with the information that was subsequently provided to him.” (color for emphasis mine. BB)
I, Brenda Bowers, do sincerely wish to thank YES!WEEKLY for two very generous actions in their post today. First, putting the Opinionated Old Broad’s name in the same sentence with Ben Holder. Ben Holder is highly respected and admired by the members of the blogosphere, and I am sure by people all over the triad as a man seeking and finding truth and justice. He has dedicated his life to righting wrongs. It is indeed an honor and privilege to be linked with him if only in this one small matter.
Second, by proving my point that they egregiously used journalistic shenanigans to turn truth into a lie by calling the Rhino’s a mere printing Walt Jone’s (Stacy Morton’s defense attorney) account of the incident in question a “retraction”. In today’s post they refer to this as merely “semantics”. I stated in my last paragraph that if caught they would make this claim.
“That one little word "retraction" that made all the difference. And what makes this so frightening for the average reader is that all thru the quotes of the "Retraction" the reader is told that the speaker is Walt Jones. And yet because the quote is labeled "Retraction" the reader misreads "said Jones" and accepts what Jordan Green wants the reader to accept and that is that Jerry Bledsoe is speaking. In truth, Jerry Bledsoe made only one retraction. He had stated in his account that the case was thrown out by the court when in fact Stacey Morton was acquitted. Bledsoe explains this in detail and apologizes for not double checking his sources by seeing the actual records himself but taking the word of a clerk. The final assault on the truth is well understood by Jordan Green also, and that is that the average reader having failed to comprehend what was written will continue to believe the last version they read which is Mr. Green's. It won't matter that Ben Holder gives an accurate and point by point refutation of Jordan Green's article. It won't matter that I ( with a specialty in Reading Education by the way) am pointing out just what exactly was done to mislead the reader. The lie will stand as truth. And if Jordan Green is forced to admit his misleading journalistic endeavor he can simply apologize for mis-using one little word. No big deal to misuse one little word in the whole long article is there? BB”
Jordan Green was found out and he did exactly what deceivers always do when their deceit is found out, he fell back on the old rusty excuse “It’s just a matter of semantics”. People I leave you to judge for yourself just as Jordan Green has left you. Was the mere printing of a letter from another person who disagreed with the article the paper had printed a “retraction”? (withdrawal, renunciation) Or was it a mere courtesy to give the opposing side an equal opportunity to state their case? Printing of a Letter to the Editor as the Rhino and other news papers do all the time. BB
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Dec. 21, 2007 at 11:11
by BrendaBee
Should the city release the information about the alleged assault of three police officers on two women one of whom is alleged to be a police officer also? The assault was reported to the police and was said to have happened in a police vehicle.
Well let's look at it this way: Three bakers allegedly assaulted a pastry girl and her friend in a bakery delivery truck. The assault was reported to the police. In any similar situation which we have all seen many times all names and dates and places and details were released almost before the ink was dry on the police report forms. There would be pictures of all the people involved and the truck and interviews with other employees and friends and foes of all five people and their in laws. Heck if one of them owed a dog it too would be pictured if not interviewed. So what makes this case different?
You tell me because I have no idea. ..........Unless, maybe someone is afraid that if these three are not protected then they may just spill a whole lot of other beans that some people don't want spilled. I mean, assault whether sexual or not is a serious charge and would mean jail time for those found guilty. One or all three of these guys may just be telling their superiors that if I go down then you all go down with me.
Reminds me of that old proverb my mom taught me, "Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive!" Author: Sir Walter Scott ... And there have been those who have been practicing to deceive in Greensboro for a couple years or more. BB
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Dec. 18, 2007 at 11:47
by BrendaBee
Cara Michele has a very interesting post today here relating her interviewed with a policeman friend. The first question was of particular interest to me and I believe I understand why she asked that question. She asked him specifically about the drop in the homicide rate in 2004 and whether it was because the feds were in town. Cara Michele and I had a friendly debate of sorts when this came up last week (Dec. 11). I said the drop in homicides in 2004 was due to David Wray having gotten his programs in place putting more experienced police on the streets at the times that homicides generally occur which is at night. He did this by putting the force on rotating shifts. Now it is just common sense that the more experienced and older personnel on the force if given their choice of shifts to work will take the normal daytime shifts leaving the rookies and less experienced police officers to deal with the high crime times of the evening and night. I claimed therefore that David Wray had to resort to rotating shifts. Michele said it was the presence of the feds in town.
Her policeman friends answer was, “ “Crime in the neighborhood is directly related to how visible the police are. That goes into your numbers. Where do most crimes occur? Where the police aren’t. [In 2004] there was more visibility. People were more cautious. That had an impact on the numbers.”
Of course he had a great deal more to say as he answered other questions so I do urge everyone to read this post. It was just that his particular answer proved the point I was trying to make that David Wray’s initiatives were the cause of the drop in crime in 2004. He came in to office in the summer of 2003 and in 2004 there was a significant drop in crime. This trend continued into 2005 and then in the summer and especially the fall of 2005 the City Manager Mitchell Johnson all but took over the command of the police department. David Wray orders were countermanded and then he was no longer allowed to hire or fire and finally he was locked out of his office by a City Manager whose training was physical science in college and a few seminars in management felt more able to run the police department than a man who had devoted 23 years of his life to police work.
Well, it just seemed to me that Cara Michele’s police officer friend in everything he said verified that David Wray was indeed on the correct path to putting Greensboro back on the path of being a safe city again after almost two decades of high homicide and other crime rates.
David Wray began many things while he was in office and one of them was more visibility for policemen. He had them in the streets and neighborhood policing. In order to do this he needed more policemen which the city council still hasn't seen fit to provide, or to make the most of those he had. This was the reason he had to go on the rotating shifts in an effort to make the most of the too few police officers he had. It is just common sense. Hospitals have to do the same thing because they are always short of people so they have rotating shifts so they can make the most of what they have and st the same time make sure that all shifts have a fair share of experienced people. Just common sense. David Wray then was the reason for the decline in crime in 2004 just as I said.
Please remember that in January 2006 I didn't know David Wray from, Mitch Johnson from Joe Blow. I knew who they were but absolutely nothing about them or what they were doing or not doing. I got into it on "David Wray's side purely because my psychological training taught me that it would have been impossible for this man to have worked with Blacks in the GPD and been promoted as he was for 23 years an never shown his racial tendencies. so when Mitch Johnson and the City Council said he was a racists there was no way I was going to believe them. There had to be another and logical reason why he was forced to resign. That is when and why I went looking for answers and reading everything I could find out about the man. Then of course there were the blogs and Ben Holder and The N&R and The Rhino. Bottom line the FBI said David Wray was no racist. And in 2004 because of more police visibility on the streets be causes of a program David Wray put into practice there was less crime. In fact the usual 30+ murders was dropped to 16 that year. Something bad has been going on in Greensboro and one man was turning it around. Something bad happened when people were able to get rid of him. Who but the criminals had a reason to get rid of him?
The last time Greensboro saw homicide rates were in the teens was under Police Chief Swing in the 1980’s. Again I will refer you to one of Cara Michele’s posts here Then Police Chief Daughtry ( Greensboro’s first Black Police Chief) came in in January 87 and the crime rate began to rise and has never come back down except for the first full year of David Wray’s administration when there were only 16 homicides in a city that regularly experienced 30 or more. So what caused the rise in crime from 1987 onward? What was different about the GPD. What was different about the make up of the police force? What was different about the goals and outlook of the police force? Was crime more tolerated by the Police Chiefs and police officers after Chief Daughtry took office. The after him we had Chief White, another Black man. And now we have chief Bellamy. These are question I believe that have to be answered before we get a handle on crime. Why did it climb so swiftly after 1987?
Going back in the newspaper accounts there was a good deal of rumblings about the police not caring what happened in the Black communities. But then if this was true why were there so many less crimes? Because the fact is, the vast majority of crimes are Black on Black.
Is it truly a cultural difference in expectations? I don’t want to believe this, but the crime rate did rise and therefore seems to be tolerated under Black Police Chiefs (Daughtry, White, Bellamy). Are White Police Chiefs less tolerant of crime and especially homicide? I’m going in circles here and I don’t necessarily like what I am seeing, or think I am seeing. I just know that something must be done about crime in Greensboro. Not because we are suddenly in a crime wave, but because we have been in a crime wave for the past 25+ years!
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AND SO I GO YESTERDAY, TODAY AND TOMORROW is proudly produced by Policlicks 2008
Doug, Has it occurred to anyone that everything this group has done, at least in the past four years that I have been in Greensboro, makes no sense? There was of course the biased and sensational Truth and Reconciliation Report which was snubbed by all of Greensboro, then there was the Declaration of Intolerable Racism that our current honorable Mayor signed and stood up for even tho she herself had voted for and participated in activities that were now being called "intolerable racism". Her answer for doing this, "You don't have to agree with everything...". Then we were treated to the march wherein there were more reporters than marchers. Given just these few actions by The Pulpit Forum I am dumbfounded as to why and how these people are given any attention at all by the media or anyone else. Well I should rephrase that since they aren't given any attention by anyone but the media. (And I am embarrassed to admit, we Greensboro bloggers. But hey, it had been a slow week and this at least gave us something to blog about. And also to gather together and hash and rehash on Ed Cone's site. "Hashing" is one of us bloggers favorite things, ya know.)
I would like to have the N&R cover the next dog fight to take place Randleman Road if they would as I am sure this will garner a lot more interest by the public. And it would make a whole lot more sense! Brenda Bowers