There’s a pornography store a few blocks from my house right accross the street from an elementary school. I’m pretty sure there is a law against this in Denver. At any rate, it just seems wrong and I don’t want that hell hole anywhere near my house. The city says they’re going to do something about it but it’s going to happen at the government’s pace which means that it will be delayed indefinitely.
Isn’t there something that citizens can do against something like this? Can’t we get our own Minute Men and block the doorway for a week? That would send a good message. I was thinking how much destructive grafitti there is in Denver and how great it would be to put spray paint to good use. I know it goes against the “rule of law” concept that keeps our society in good working order, but lately I’ve been feeling like I’m getting the short end of the night-stick.
Take Saturday night for example. My brother and I wanted to get out and go skateboarding so we went to the downtown skate park. The lights turned off at 11:00pm but there was still plenty of light so we kept skating. A cop snuck up with her lights off on her motorcycle. She caught us and gave us each “park violations” carrying a fine of $50. This was the very night that some punks kids were doing $70 worth of damage to my car back home. I’m all for keeping people out of parks at night but if it’s a question of resources, why not take the cops off of the park beat and put them in charge of protecting citizens of Denver?
In my neighborhood, a few bad apples spoil the barrel. We’ve had trouble with the same group of kids for the two years that I’ve lived there. They’ve terrorized people, broken windows, broken into houses, and kept us all up for countless hours during the night. I’ve probably called the cops over 30 times and each time the cops simply take them somewhere for a half an hour and then bring them back. They tell me that there’s nothing that they can do because there is not enough room in the juvenile detention center for these kids.
I have a few ideas that are really simple:
1) Put them in the adult jails
2) Build a new juvenile detention center (we just gave you several million dollars for a new jail - that outta help)
3) Put them in an alcoholic recovery center
4) Build a guantanamo-style detention center
I’m sure that there are perfectly good reasons why these four ideas won’t work but I’m starting to get really frustrated that the city can’t seem to be able to run the city.
They have to charge money for us to get to work on time, there isn’t enough space in the juvenile detention center to keep bad kids off the streets but by golly we better punish those law-abiding 29 year olds for being in the park at night. I really want to know where all that tax money is going that keeps getting snatched from my paycheck?