Steve Mensing, Editor
♦ An undermanned Salisbury Police Department is simply no match for the city’s mushrooming crime challenges. For starters the city police lack the manpower for adequate citywide patrol. The underfunded police department does not have enough experienced policemen to defend the city against a tidal wave of criminals. Many city services lack sufficient funding and the police department is one of them. Officers get trained here and then go elsewhere for superior pay and benefits. “Police leakage” was especially evident in the recent loss of the police department’s only certified Crime Scene Investigator (CSI) Sherri Curry:
In 2014 violent crime, murders, shootings, armed robberies, and aggravated assaults dominated the news here week after week in a city of only 33 thousand residents. Large gang networks assert control in many of the city’s poor neighborhoods and affect the high schools and middle schools within Salisbury’s boundaries. The city’s drug epidemic, dominated by heroin, meth, and crack, is breathtaking and fuels plenty of secondary crime to pay for addictions. Petty property crimes are a daily occurrence as witnessed in the crime “blotter” in the city’s print newspaper. Burglaries, break-ins, car thefts, and vandalism (broken windows, graffiti, and gang tags) occur with regularity.
The recently posted FBI crime statistics for Salisbury (2013) show more violent crime than (2012):
A May article on police department’s understaffing challenges:
In a city with an overabundance of violent criminals and break-in artists and too few police in patrol cars, citizens need to take responsibility for their own protection. Becoming a part of a trained neighborhood watch is one good answer, the other is arming yourself and securing your home from unwanted entry:
http://rowanfreepress.com/2014/03/29/best-methods-for-stopping-home-invasions-and-break-ins/
