Annapolis Capital Punishment

This is an open letter to Mayor Moyer:

Dear Mayor Moyer:

I write this letter to you because I still respect your hard work and your lifelong commitment to public service, and many of your achievements as an alderwoman and as mayor, but I think we are in a crisis of leadership and a crisis of violence, and a financial one may be looming. You must act now and act decisively.


Your disrespectful and argumentative comments, arrogance,and callous attitude toward so many issues and so many of my fellow residents are causing great enmity to keep boiling up from within our city. At the very least, you should immediately come forward and sincerely apologize for the rude remarks you made about Eastport residents who testified about crime at the recent City Council meeting. You have managed to alienate so many people, including longtime supporters including me, and I have privately and publicly defended and supported you on many occasions.

In the wake of the January 14th City Council meeting where over 40 Eastport residents pleaded for action on crime, followed by your inexcusable remarks in The Sun the following day, I wrote to and called three key individuals in government, urging them to speak with you and request that you immediately apologize to the Eastport residents and pledge to get busy on this serious issue of crime and violence. I never heard back from two of them and the third was indirect and vague. No surprise there, but I tried. One of them is one of your appointees. I had hoped their counsel would help you moderate your attitude and I have no idea whether they spoke with you or not. Now I am going public, even though you have repeatedly demonstrated to me and many others that you rarely if ever listen to anyone.

Our situation is serious, not only in terms of the obvious crime issue, but our local government is in crisis, in disarray. I really think you and your administration may be headed for disaster because of your apparent inability to provide leadership and direction to the ones who serve at your pleasure. While many of us are amazed at how thin-skinned and vicious you can be, I think we'll be satisfied with leadership or at least competent management.

Mayor Moyer, I implore you to take a serious look at how you have let us down. We have an ongoing Market House debacle and are now being sued and all you can say is that the plaintiffs don't like you. You refuse to fire the police chief who is at retirement age and has suffered from poor health. Like you, he seems unable or unwilling to confront our crime wave and we are engaged in another lawsuit over the police head-quarter's renovation. How did two major lawsuits over construction on city properties come about? I think it is because you have ineffective and incompetent managers who are given conflicting orders. We have an even more serious legal situation with the fire-fighter's pension issue, and we may very well have a looming fiscal crisis, but it's crime that is really on every one's mind right now.

While you are correct that there are many external reasons for vacancies in our police department that may be beyond our control , I believe you, Chief Johnson and Human Resources Director Kimla Milburn are responsible for letting this go on for so long. You seemed unaware that it was worsening, unable to plan for this situation and and were slow to react when it hit. Because it takes a long time and many initial applicants to bring a new recruit on to the streets in uniform, this is inexcusable. I give you credit for improving the salary and benefits for our police officers, but now we all need your help in bringing on more officers.

But please do not continue to brush off this festering vacancy problem as a non-issue. Please do not continue to tell us misleading statistics about officers per capita, national averages or whatever other statistic pleases you. This is a bureaucratic shell game. You and your highly-paid appointees have let us down. More police officers are set to retire this year.

You took off on a long jaunt to Europe this summer. Of course you deserve a vacation, but how many weeks were you away? Was it six or was it eight? You have focused much energy and time on sister cities issues, and you've been to I don't know how many conferences on global warming. You've spearheaded puffy things such as your Lacey Ann Regina campaign to stop littering and your self-touted Cloud Nine effort to develop a curriculum on clean air for school children.

I don't know whether it cleared our or air or eliminated trash, but I do know our air is dirtied with gun smoke and our ground is littered with corpses. How much did we spend to develop that clean air class? Was it $45,000? $50,000? More? Meanwhile, we could not get you to ride a bus or even try to ride a bike for Bike to Work Day or lift a finger to get employees out of their cars to get to work or pay attention to real and serious mismanagement at our transportation department. But I digress...or do I?

I have been a committed environmental advocate since before the first Earth Day in 1970 and I applaud many of your "green" efforts. However your overemphasis on beautification issues at the expense of our public safety is inexcusable. The ability to walk is an environmental issue. Violence on our streets is an environmental issue. Decrepit public housing projects are an environmental issue.

Complacent in your comfortable second term as mayor, you are seemingly more focused on telling people off than on building partnerships. Consider the remarks you have made about Mr. Eric Brown of the Housing Authority. I have never seen or heard of him making any such remarks about you. While you use The Capital as a bully pulpit to insult and fight with the Housing Authority, people are getting murdered! I'll bet the criminals are laughing because they know you're focusing on making political and personal enemies instead of catching them. Even worse, in our own city magazine which we pay for, you blame citizens who write letters to the editor for making it harder for you to fight crime and attract new officers.

Recently we had a double homicide, a huge cocaine bust and an officer was wounded during a raid in which a man was killed. One of the victim's has a ten-year old son at nearby Georgetown East. I wonder if he was taught your clean air curriculum? All of this occurred near my home. Why do we continue to have serious drug trafficking at and near public housing?

Mayor Moyer, you asked us what it is you're missing about crime. Many people have answered in many ways. Many people have tried to do and say what they can, but you do not listen. After you never answered a lengthy letter that an Eastport activist wrote to you with many suggestions about crime, I published it here. The fact that we were down so many police officers was bad enough. You have continually misused statistics and studies to claim that we have more than enough police officers, but we don't. I have repeatedly shown on this blog the lack of veracity in your claim which is easily refuted by a report from the International Association of Chiefs of Police and other readily available sources.

Your thin-skin is legendary. You never seem satisfied with supporters unless they give you 100% unquestioning loyalty. 99% loyalty makes them your enemy. You never let off about who did what or how you did something and never got thanked. You are the mayor. Be the mayor. Earn our respect. Stop whining, complaining and pointing fingers. Stop blaming us for being angry and concerned about increasing gun violence. Stop intimidating citizens who are doing what you asked us to do by giving you ideas!

It may be too late to get you to learn to be a listener. The habit of not listening, which you have so amply demonstrated to me personally on many occasions, is perhaps something that cannot be changed. All I know as a citizen is that it makes it incredibly difficult to communicate with you. Be that as it may, the big question is about governance and leadership, and not about whether you are liked or disliked, although it can impact your ability to govern and lead--and it has. You are an intelligent and highly accomplished woman. Be proud of that and be proud that you are our mayor. Now please be the mayor.

You have two years left. Key people need to go. We have a lot of dead wood in your administration, many of them being equally poor managers, but we, yes we have to pay them each over $100,000 per year. We demand results with our tax dollars. If you wait any longer,it will be impossible to replace them until after you are replaced. The sinecure that you have chosen as city administrator needs to do something useful or be replaced. If it's so bad that you sent him away to foreign countries to build sister cities during the last budget cycle, why not just eliminate the job and refund us his salary? We can use a tax rebate from the oppressive taxes we pay with increasingly less representation.

But most of all--tackle crime. Get cops on the street. Your recent change in operational shifts may improve matters a bit, but the jury is still out. Your idea to get a horse and a couple of $@%%# Segways is ridiculous. RIDICULOUS. Just because you like horses and *@^^# Segways does not mean they are a good idea. Set up a real plan with we the residents that comes with real performance standards for our police department. What are our expectations of service? Response time? How will we track results? This is what many police departments do, but do we do it? I am not aware of it. Instead you say that we are accredited and officers have received advanced training. That's good. We want to support our officers, but has that made a dent in crime?

Many of us want to implement real community policing. The chief tried to explain his vision of community service at a public meeting (after he was provided with the question in advance) and I was left wondering what he said. Figure out once and for all whether the Housing Authority is public or private, federal or city, and what role we will take--or must take. Make a plan to transform it, because it has got to go. The numerous housing projects in our midst are the result of a failed policy that is bringing us all down. They effectively serve nobody. They are a breeding grounds for crime, despair and cynicism. They are the main reason we have so much violent crime. This cannot be argued, the points can be analyzed and refined, but the fact is a fact. Just stop pointing fingers and blaming others, which seems to be your Achilles heel. Just lead and act. We don't care whether you like Eric Brown or not. We care that you work with him to fight crime.

What will it take for this to happen? More murders? More violence? More public protests?

You are the mayor. Be the mayor. In the words of Ted Turner, "Lead, follow or get out of the way."

In the words of what Uncle Ben said to Peter Parker in Spiderman:

"With great power comes great responsibility."

You have great power. Get more police on the streets and make recruitment an ongoing priority. Work with HACA. Put officers out in the areas where crime occurs and when it occurs. Redouble your recruitment efforts. Gather, study and evaluate all crime reports with citizen input. Work with our civic associations. Develop volunteer community patrols and give us radios. Lead us on walks at night to "take back the streets." Show the criminals they are not welcome. Show them we will prevail. Stop arguing with and blaming HACA, Eastport residents and anyone else who speaks out. Stop pointing fingers.

But please be the mayor.

Many years ago, when you were still an Alderman, you told me, and I remember it clearly, that you had no desire to go further politically than serving as an Alderman. You told me that at your age at that time, you were not going to pursue higher office. But as have many politicians since time immemorial, you did--twice in fact. You now have two years left as mayor. You can create your legacy now. Your legacy can be that of a mayor who grabbed the reins of power, brought people together and cleaned up violent crime. Your legacy can be that of a mayor who transformed public housing for the benefit of all.

The alternative legacy, the one you are likely to have should you continue on this path, will be that of a mayor who planted trees and flowers that got fertilized by all the blood that was spilled. The alternative legacy will be that of the mayor who tried to clean up our streets that were littered with corpses by creating flowery Lacey Anne Regina graphics on trashcans.

I fully expect you to blow your top when you read this and start screaming and directing anger toward me and others. I'm not your problem. You have much bigger problems than me. I'm just the messenger. You are the mayor. Please be the mayor we want and we expect you to be.

Sincerely,

Paul Foer