Sheriff schedules Gun Violence Roundtable

2 thoughts on “Sheriff schedules Gun Violence Roundtable”

1. Unfortunately, the Sheriff choose the same date and time of our regular business meeting. We have time-certain items that must be discussed and voted on as required by DOE, before the Superintendent attends the Board of Education meeting next week.

   The superintendent will send an employee to represent the school district.

   I greatly appreciate and support the Sheriff’s efforts to help make our communities safer.

   Due to this school board scheduling conflict, I regretfully cannot attend.

2. OUR AREA GUN VIOLENCE IS NOT A REFLECTION OF THE FAILURE OF OUR AREA LAW ENFORCEMENT TO “KEEP UP.”

   OUR AREA GUN VIOLENCE IS A SYMPTOM OF OUR AREA’S SOCIOECONOMIC, HOUSING, ADDICTION, AND MENTAL HEALTH CRISES.

   Whose fault is our area’s socioeconomic, housing, addiction, and mental health crises?

   (1) The area agencies and policy makers who choose–and not all of them do–to mollycoddle the status quo; turn a blind eye to wasted resources going right into self-enriching pockets and puff programs; drum up fake issues to smoke screen the screaming issues; and shovel sparking PR while denying the reality all around them; and

   (2) The voters who throw roses at their feet for raining down red herrings on our heads, distracting us from the fact that they aren’t fixing our issues–and, in some cases, aren’t even trying.

   We’re looking at you…

   * Escambia County School District–both the School Board Members and the Superintendent;
   * the two-thirds of our state delegation who are nowhere on leading per these issues;
   * poverty pimps (you know who you are, and so do we); and
   * hospitals and “mental health agencies”–and there aren’t big enough quotes for that last laughable area notion.

   Is ECSD perfect? Of course not. Although I’m a big supporter of Sheriff Simmons and his Neighborhood Division leads, and see the stunning improvements to the culture of the force that has come about in a pretty short time, IMHO they’ve had enough black hat galas and corvette rides now in a community that is deeply suffering from a wide spectrum of daily real-world problems. (Many of our fellow citizens won’t see in three years’ income the money it takes to throw a single self-congratulatory event.) And they need to hire Black detectives yesterday. Don’t care how much it costs. Get them here, and give them what they need to do the job.

   But we should *all* be sick to death of our deputies shouldering the gross failures of the school system; the deep stater do-nothing and yipping lap dog on our delegation; many of the area agencies and “non profits” jockeying for that federal funding stamp so they can beef up those untraceable private donations; and–worst of all–our area health care administrations continuing in their covetous greed of every last penny to turn their backs on the community while taking scads of tax dollars for services THEY AREN’T PROVIDING.

   Despite Michelle Salzman’s best and sincere efforts, and despite Connie Bookman’s best and sincere efforts–if these giant, back-door conglomerations of movers and shakers were going to make *any* material improvements, we would have seen some by now.

   And no, the answer isn’t to get Allison Patton elected as some deus ex machina because no, her shoving through the Marbut plan won’t solve these issues. Why? BECAUSE WHAT AILS THIS COMMUNITY IS NOT GOING TO BE SOLVED BY JUSTICE AND ENFORCEMENT SOLUTIONS.

   I’d like to throttle whatever genius came up with the Defund the Police slogan. If there was ever a more stupid, destructive, and childish reduction of our societal ills, I guess it is only second to Stop the Steal. We *need* our police. What we do *not* need is our policing agencies stuck in a position of mental health first responders getting zero help from the community on runaway addiction problems that our policy makers refuse to admit, address, OR ADEQUATELY FUND. Fund Them Both.

   It has been heartening to see our BCC grappling with these issues honestly in recent meetings, and really listening to area experts who are down in the trenches with it. City Council is to be commended for grappling with the homeless issue head on (blame the Mayor for turning a blind eye on oversight). Thank you to Community Health for stepping into the gaping gulf to provide some measure of help where the other, established entities refuse to do even when they have contracts to do it. Thank you to agencies such as Health and Hope Clinic for keeping so many people alive–but now let’s focus on not having so many people end up at your door in the first place.

   Most of all, thank you to all of our individual social workers and volunteers out in the field every day, who are the closest thing to health care and mental support that many people will ever get in our community.

   These days, when people contact me about not being able to get the mental health care or addiction support they need for themselves or loved ones, I’m now at the point where the only ethical answer I can give them is the following:

   “You’re not going to get it here. If you’ve got the money, seek it elsewhere. If you don’t, then consider moving out of here altogether where you can afford it. Because It. Does. Not. Exist. Here.”

   I *don’t* tell people, “well you know you should really get out of dodge because our Sheriff can’t control our street violence.”

   When people call me to ask which public schools to put their kids in to avoid these idiotic culture wars, I tell them “there aren’t any.” And point out that a literal Nazi sympathizer is running one of our school board member’s PR for him, while he hearts quotes about how the Third Reich was better than Woke liberals and obsessively sweats over the sexualization of children on ECW. But this candidate and the rest of his board along with him apparently got no time for gun violence impacting our children.

   Thankfully I do *not* have to tell people any more, “your sheriff’s department could care less about your kids.”

   Doesn’t this indicate that maybe, just maybe, we’ve got these problems from the wrong end of the stick? Maybe if the SCHOOL BOARD cared about kids more than pandering to the lowest common denominator for their own political careers, or the HEALTH CARE ADMINISTRATORS cared about the health of this community more than they did their bottom lines, our POLICE wouldn’t have so much street crime to deal with from the get-go, and could focus more on evolving to proactive investigations and community policing?

   Voters: don’t you think you should be demanding that the Superintendent and Chair of the School Board attend this meeting?

   Voters: Don’t you think you should be demanding of our delegation why we have zero mental health and drug recovery services here? One of our representatives loved to lecture me back in the day how he has family in hospital administration and knows everything about it. Okay, so what’s your solution for *any* of the ways our area healthcare agencies are falling down on mental health services?

   What’s that you say? Oh….that’s right. I forgot. This is all about Black on Black crime, and fatherless families.

   Sorry. Don’t know what got into me today.

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