It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.
Mark Twain
Clearly - there are mental-health issues in Nelson - just like anywhere else - but the Nelson Police Department (NPD) turning this issue into a mental-health crisis to manipulate the public emotionally - via gullible local news-media - for funding-approval of largely in-house benefit - has been inappropriate at best.
It has made the NPD appear frenzied and out-of-control. Certainly not inspiring trust in its ability to handle a real crisis - should it ever arise.
This includes the Nelson Police Board - guided by then Mayor/Board Chair John Dooley - in giving shape to the NPD's bizarre Provisional Budget 2015, presented to Council in Oct. 2014.
Eventually the NPD had to run out of manufactured reasons for gaining a very substantial increase in its definitive 2015 Budget - not once supported with a clearly documented local need - and went silent on said crisis after Feb. 16 - one month ago. Mental-health crisis? What mental-health crisis!
This sudden silence raises more questions than previous consistently loud, disjointed and self-righteous fear-mongering by the NPD: presenting itself in emergency-mode, with no time left for policing after forever having to drive mentals to the hospital and back. This only fixable with lots of money: to get more cops. To join the complimentary taxi-service?
In the meantime - what with your ever so overworked and misunderstood neighborhood-cop turned overtly entitled and hostile: prominent among questions must be that of confidence in the NPD's cash 'n carry willingness/intention to work for the common good.
I - and many others - totally support Council and Mayor Kozak in following the NPD's mental-health trajectory since Oct. 2014: including obtaining data from the hospital on the number and frequency of people baby-sat there by cops since last October.
While this taxi/baby-sitting service of mentals to/at the hospital has become the institutionalized-for-one-purpose-only cornerstone of the NPD's attempt to squeeze the Nelson tax-payer for more money: we have yet to see the NPD's never volunteered real-time numbers substantiating these hospital-run claims as well. A comparison might be interesting!
Day-by-day - with dates!
Just as we have yet to see these hordes on Baker before/when the cops round 'em up. Provided some toing-and-froing is actually going on: what are the criteria? Who decides?
So far - since Oct. 2014 - NPD-generated info on the so-called mental-health crisis in all its permutations has been completely anecdotal.
Not once challenged anywhere but on this blog.
Reasons for the need of additional cops - given in the Provisional Budget - curiously do not include this crisis and huffing-and-puffing up the hill to the hospital because of it. Reasons then: a) mostly pulled straight from a book and b) written by an author with research-methods questioned by many policing-experts: are nowhere - literally - and insulting to those the cops ostensibly are here to protect and serve.
But there you have it - or them: our Police Department and our Police Board.
Low on crime and high on themselves.
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