Media: PJS offers mayor backhanded, minimal praise for lower crime rates
It took a more than a couple days, but the anonymous gnomes who pen official opinions on the Journal Star’s award-winning (snicker) editorial page have finally editorialized about the stunning drop in violent crime from te same time last years.
As readers may recall, recently I chastised the Journal Star for failing to quote Peoria Mayor Jim Ardis even once in four articles on the issues, even though this news paper’s award-winning (snickering again) editorial page lambasted the mayor on multiple occasions for having made crime an issue when he ran for office, yet beins sensitive to what he felt was over sensationalized coverage of crime.
On Wednesday, the JSEB wrote that the drop in violent crime and murder was a good thing (how brave of them), but tucked this little comment into their piece:
In Peoria it’s too soon to draw that conclusion, even though these numbers are undeniably good news, eager as some pundits are to declare violent crime in the city a thing of the past.
Yeah … that would be me, I guess. Although I never declared violent crime a thing of the past.
Indeed, we’ve seen how quickly things can change, for better and worse. Last year’s murders came in bunches, with some months seeing as many as four killings, others none at all. The police chief and other city officials urged citizens not to panic, with assurances that if you weren’t looking for trouble in River City, you weren’t likely to find it.
Just as that was good advice then, so is a victory celebration premature now. Indeed, no sooner was Sunday’s Journal Star coming off the press with this story than a 55-year-old man was found shot in the head while sitting in his car near Club Apollo on the city’s South Side.
They are hedging their bets.
Mayor Jim Ardis also has made crime something of a bully-pulpit priority. There seems to be more neighborhood buy-in, and we hear anecdotally of some segments of the community being more cooperative with law enforcement efforts than they have been in the past.
To repeat:
When crime is up, the mayor deserved criticism because he made a bid deal about the issue when he was running for office.
When crime is down, the mayor deserves only a tiny bit of the credit, because crime “is well beyond the capacity of any one person to influence it significantly.â€
In other words, ‘let’s not heap too much praise on politicians we don’t endorse, but let’s mock and ridicule politicians we don’t like if there’s an opportunity to do so.’ That’s standard operating procedure at 1 Propaganda Plaza.
