Saturday, June 03, 2006

Bucher Postures, Violence Continues

Paul Bucher issued a press release berating state government for not answering his "challenge" to Peg Lautenschlager and Jim Doyle to fund Bucher's "90 Cops for 90 Days" grandstand ploy.

In the first place, it's not really a state problem. Bucher should first challenge Mayor Barrett and County Executive Walker to come up with solutions.

In the second place, Bucher says that the state should "free up" the money to pay for 46,800 hours of police overtime to fund his scheme. Does Paul think that the state has buckets of money lying around the Capitol that can be pulled out to make up the Milwaukee shortfall?

Thirdly, he accuses Doyle of doing nothing to alleviate the problem of violence on Milwaukee's streets. I say that Doyle acted to keep guns off the streets of Milwaukee by vetoing the Guns In Every Pocket bill put forth by the Gard/Schultz legislature. (Esther Hodges can't be blamed for the violence against her but it seems fairly certain that she wasn't shot until after she got her own weapon.)

Bucher doesn't understand the job he's running for. The AG isn't a SWAT Team leader or a street avenger. He needs to stop acting as if he has an answer for the problems in Milwaukee if the best he can do is point fingers and scream for help. Violence in our cities is a complicated problem. It's clear that the best Bucher can do is blame others and offer simplistic solutions.

Updates: Paul Soglin calls Bucher's lack of knowledge about gang psychology "grotesque."

The Milwaukee Police Union has some thoughts about the increased workload (although they didn't share them until a Dem said they'd actually find a way to fund it.)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Not in Waukesha.