Cockamamie Leadership

Ellen Moyer's stewardship of Annapolis Government may be the only thing that makes Governor O'Malley look like he's got a clue:

The mayor of Annapolis says the national search for a new police chief is being postponed indefinitely to allow the interim chief to implement his vision for the agency.

Michael Pristoop, a former lieutenant in the Baltimore City Police Department, took over the department in May after Chief Joseph S. Johnson announced his retirement. Mayor Ellen O. Moyer, whose second and final term ends next year, said at the time that she was wary of selecting a permanent chief with the possibility that her successor would want to make his or her own choice.

But officials say Pristoop has so far won rave reviews from the community, and a consulting group commissioned last fall to study the department recommended that he be brought on permanently. Pristoop had already implemented or recognized many of the initiatives suggested by the group by the time the $60,000 report was presented.

Moyer postponed the search indefinitely last month in an memo to members of the city council's public safety committee, saying that "conducting a full national search for a police chief at this time may be detrimental to reorganization of the police department.

I think that it's great that they are going to leave the Acting Chief in charge for the time being. But what kind of cockamamie, half-brained leader decides to "indefinitely postpone" a search for a successor?

Either the Acting Chief is the new Chief...or he isn't. You can't indefinitely postpone a search while leaving somebody in the acting role due to the fact that it undermines the chain of the command and the authority of the individual in charge. Why should the rank and file Annapolis police officers take the Pristoop's reorganization and vision seriously if Moyer can run him out of town for a new chief at any time. But given Moyer's record on crime and police matters, it's hardly surprising.

Ellen Moyer could never be characterized as a leader worth of respect. But even this is a new low for her horrifically poor management of Annapolis during her term.

Annapolis Silly Season in Full Force

My RedMaryland colleague Brian Gill is all over the silly season for 2009 Annapolis Mayoral Election.....and yes it's good to know that Democrats there are getting ready to eat their own, too.

The 2005 Annapolis Mayoral Election was a pretty good indicator as to how tough 2006 was going to be for Republicans here in 2006, although George Kelley's third-place(!) finish in the Mayoral Election was largely a consultant-driven fiaso who ran such a terrible campaign that I named it worst local campaign of 2005.

Annapolis is important, and it's something that holds great interest for us folks here in Anne Arundel County...

Crime Fighting by Press Conference

Well, this charade did little to solve gun violence in Baltimore:

The mayors of Baltimore and New York announced Wednesday that the two cities will start sharing information about illegal weapons they seize, creating a database that gets around a congressionally imposed restriction on information local departments can obtain about guns seized outside their borders.

Federal law gives cities only limited access to the national database that tracks guns used in crimes. The mayors hope that other cities along the Interstate 95 corridor will sign on, and by sharing the information they will be able to spot trends in regional gun trafficking that they say are invisible to them under the current system.

"This is the kind of system that the federal government should be doing, but they aren't," said New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, speaking at a news conference in the atrium of City Hall. "Cities are fighting crime in isolation. Congress has a treasure trove of data and we are not allowed to see it."

So....how is this going to stop people from being killed in our streets? It's not. The use of "illegal guns" by criminals in an illegal fashion is still illegal. Do these liberals really think that by sharing data that they are going to "solve" the use of illegal guns?

If the mayors of these cities, which does include the violence-plagued cities of Baltimore and Annapolis, are so hellbent on fixing crime, let's actually see something done to fix the problem. Change policing strategies. Get tough on crime. Encourage vigorous prosecution of accused criminals. Implement Project EXILE. And don't do dumb stuff like buy Segways like they did in Annapolis at the expense of actual crime fighting. Our friend Brian Gill has numerous examples of the idiocy in crime-fighting in Annapolis.

Mayors Against Illegal Guns is not interested in solving crime, but is merely a fringe group in favor of further restricting the rights of honest Americans to own firearms. Their discussion of "illegal guns" is nothing more than trying to put lipstick on the pig that is their crime fighting strategies. Many of the cities involved with Bloomberg and his cronies have severe crime problems. Maybe if they spent less time having press conferences and more time trying to fix the problems in their cities, these "illegal guns" wouldn't make as much of a difference...

Government Operating Outside its Scope....Again

Can somebody explain to me what the hell a Sailing Hall of Fame has to do with the Maryland Stadium Authority? That seems to be the entire problem in building a new Sailing Hall of Fame in Annapolis is that the State seems to be in the middle of it, where it naturally does not belong:

State involvement through the Stadium Authority is completely out of line, but not out of recent practices for the authority. The Stadium Authority was originally created to build Camden Yards and then build what eventually turned into M&T Bank Stadium. Of course the scope wound up going much farther than that, though I guess if you squint a university Commons Building kinda looks like a Stadium.

Furthermore, does anybody really think that downtown Annapolis needs a Sailing Hall of Fame smack in the middle of it? It seems to me that this would be the kind of urban renewal project that so disturbs a historic area that it would be the kind of thing that Democrats would hate to see in place. I mean, I certainly don't want the view of City Dock disturbed by the construction of some monstrous, unnecessary building. But of course, Annapolis Mayor Ellen Moyer loves the concept, even if there is likely no discernible economic benefit to the city from its construction. There is certainly no benefit to state taxpayers who seem like they are going to get stuck with part of the bill.

The only way to fix this is through two solutions. The short term solution is to pull state funding for the construction of this Hall of Fame complex and allow it to continue only with the use of private money. Second, the General Assembly needs to legislatively remove the ability of the Maryland Stadium Authority to build new projects, thus restricting them to managing the projects currently under their purview until the facilities can be privatized.

For more info on the Sailing Hall of Fame and it's relationship to our Capital City, my Red Maryland colleague Brian Gill has an excellent post on the matter.

Perceptions propagate problems

Apparently the Moyer Administration down in Annapolis is starting to learn that if people perceive crime to be a problem, then it is:

With the sudden force of a summer storm off the Chesapeake Bay, much of Annapolis seems to be in an uproar over crime.

Businesses are offering reward money to catch violent robbers. Residents are meeting to discuss their safety. The mayor has issued four policy statements on law enforcement the past month, proposing longer police shifts, security cameras at public-housing complexes and officers on horseback and Segways.

Yet violent crime in Annapolis actually dropped 8 percent during the first six months of 2007 as compared with the same period last year. The city has had as many homicides this year -- four -- as bigger cities report in a week. And all those cases were quickly solved.

Then why the sudden concern? Combine a couple of high-profile crimes in prime locations of the city, alarm being sounded by City Council members while the mayor was away on an extended vacation, and the fact that one victim was walking home from the influential Annapolis Yacht Club.

"That's almost the perfect storm," said Ross H. Arnett III, a yacht club member who is also a Democratic alderman, representing Ward 8. "It doesn't happen that often."

The crimes that led to the heightened concern were near some of the city's best-known restaurants and businesses. On July 24, a restaurant worker was severely beaten and robbed by a group of people while walking home in Eastport, a neighborhood of upscale businesses and homes. On July 31, a young female employee of the yacht club was assaulted by a robber in Eastport while returning home.

Neither case has been solved. Although overall crime is down, incidents of aggravated assault and motor-vehicle theft are up for the first six months of the year.

The July 31 attack, in particular, "got the yacht club energized," said Arnett, whose district includes Eastport. "The yacht club has a lot of powerful members."

Other than the obvious slant against the rich, the story goes on to point out that crime as a whole is down in the city of Annapolis. It's only that the perception is that crime is in fact rising, particularly in affluent highly trafficked areas. There is absolutely no way to publicly deny that a problem is happening if so many people perceive that there is a problem. And the city has been absolutely incapable of doing anything that makes it seem like anything other than a crimewave is sweeping the city.

Do I ever feel imperiled in Annapolis? Absolutely not. Then again, I stay on heavily trafficked areas and don't actually live there, so my experiences may be somewhat different. The city's problem is that it isn't the tourists who have a problem with seeing the crime; it's the residents, and that creates big big problems for elected officials and city leaders.

Of course, having an absentee Mayor off in Europe for two months probably didn't help the cause, either....

Just asking...

...but don't you think Annapolis Alderman Sam Shropshire is spending too much time focusing on eliminating plastic bags if he feels it necessary to write a column in the Capital defending his spending too much time focusing on eliminating plastic bags? Particularly when it is the lead item on his campaign website?