By David Cruz
Correspondent
On Monday, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka announced that his city was in a state of emergency after three murders and 11 shootings during the holiday weekend. Surrounded by police brass, the mayor laid down the gauntlet.
“We are not gonna temper ourselves. We’re coming very aggressively at the 1 percent of violent offenders in our city that are completely wreaking havoc across our city and we’re going to eventually bring them to justice,” Baraka said.
But before the day was over, another victim had died from his injuries. Since then, in fact, there have been four more homicides. Eight, in the last eight days, capped last night with the killing of a cop’s son last night. Confidence in the embattled police force — never high to begin with — is, again, slipping.
“Another thing we are doing is our narcotics investigations. We’re working with the prosecutor’s office in many of the hot spot areas that we’ve received violent crime, experienced violent crime. It’s been because of narcotics or gang activity,” said Newark Police Director Eugene Venable.
Activist Donna Jackson, a frequent critic of the police department, says the city is in crisis and the department is overwhelmed.
“If I’m leaving one crime scene to another crime scene and I’m here and there and we got two and three shootings going on at two and three different locations and now we’re talking about joint partnering and now we’ll be coming together with the town of Irvington, which we must do, with East orange, that’s gonna be even more overwhelming for these officers,” she said.
Tonight the mayor will hold the first of four town hall–style meetings centering on the crime situation. This week, he sounded like many of the mayor’s who preceded him, accentuating the positive while acknowledging the negative.
“Robberies are down 17 percent, homicides down 30 percent, auto theft down 20, carjackings are down 51 percent. Robberies down 17 percent. Burglaries down 6 percent. But, if you were one of the 84 victims of the violence that took place, the reductions in homicides doesn’t matter to you. If you are a family member of one of the victims who were killed because of the violence that has taken place in the city, the reductions in homicide don’t matter to you, either,” Baraka said.
Tonight, Baraka will try to reassure his city that this is a temporary spike and not a long-term trend, but, as the mayor himself admitted, it’s a distinction that will be lost on most residents.