Posted on 08/28/2002 1:02:00 PM PDT by Dog Gone
Let's see, 100 million, times 278....Looks like no payraise or Christmas donut bonus for the Houston PD boys this year!
$5,000 for a class on public speaking so he can give a "State of the City Address" (and this after he had been mayor for 3 years)
An all expense paid trip to Africa for himself and his wife (visiting a sister city, so they claimed)
$15,000 (I believe) for a Welcome to Houston sign at the major airport, it has his picture and name on it, and the way it is designed it cannot be changed when he is no longer in office.
Pamphlets out of the Education Department on bettering education and indorcing higher learning.... It was filled with spelling and grammar errors.
The list is endless. Should this city survive Brown and his 3 terms, without going into bankruptcy, I will be highly surprised.
You'd have to understand the strange politics, and the shadow government that exists in Houston politics. He was annointed by what is known in other cities as the Chamber of Commerce, and installed with the help of the Houston Chronicle.
Brown has been a useful stooge to the people who wanted new stadiums, urban renewal, and higher taxes. Ken Lay, for example, was a big backer of Brown.
In years to come,we are going to hear more of this "lawful-unlawful" orders affair.
Nice to know you spent so much time and effort informing yourself to arrive at your opinion. Go read the rest of the posts before jumping to the wrong conclusions.
Kmart wanted the problem dealt with -- loiterers and drag racers.
Unfortunately, HPD went nuts. Rather than going after the loiterers and drag racers, they just started swooping in, blocking exits, and arresting every single person present, including legitimate customers, on bogus charges.
The James Coney Island raid was conducted on adults who had been meeting for ten years with the blessing of the owner of the establishment and were doing absolutely nothing wrong.
Because the police made no effort to separate legitimate patrons from loiterers in either raid, they destroyed their own credibility.
The drag racers and loiterers need to be dealt with, but that probably isn't possible now.
If only that were true. An editorial by a nearby resident said that the police only dispersed the crowd "two or three times in the past six months". The HPD let this grow into a big problem, then responded with military tactics.
If they had been patrolling the area, dispersing crowds, handing out tickets for loitering, and arresting people that actually committed a crime over the past six months, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
Now when the nut case kids get killed while drag racing the parents of my johnny does no wrong sues Wal-Mart and the policee from not protecting their kids from themselvs.
Only 42 of the 278 arrested were juveniles. The rest were legally adults. Are you going to blame their parents, too?
Most of us are questioning the actions of the police, which are very likely to be found illegal under Texas law. That doesn't mean that there wasn't a problem: only that the response to the problem was inappropriate.
Actually, it's not even clear that K-Mart wanted the problem to be dealt with. The Police Chief admitted today that K-Mart did not sign an affidavit requesting the police to conduct this action, and K-Mart earlier stated that they did not request this raid.
He is a minority democrat. I don't think he is so much corrupt (even his arch-enemies allow that he is a nice guy) as he is profoundly incompetent. His incompetence effectively amounts to handing out blank checks on the city treasury to the corrupt and wealthy like Ken Lay.
Houston is taking in record revenue because of property valuation inflation, and running in the red because Houston's powerful and wealthy are raiding the treasury.
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