This month in Hartford, Ct. a former deputy mayor was attacked shortly after 9 a.m. by several youths near the state Capitol. Then police found the decomposing body of a man in the basement of a foreclosed house. Later that day, says the Boston Globe, an uneasy city was forced to confront an image that many still can’t shake: Furious police officials released a security video of an elderly man struck by a hit-and-run driver as he was trying to cross the street, then ignored by passing motorists as he lay on the pavement. Mayor Eddie Perez reminded people that “we have made the city safer over the past few years.”
Some activists and other politicians insist that the incidents are symptoms of a city not only with a major crime problem, but one that is decaying at its moral core. As the security video was played again and again on television, the 78-year-old victim lay in a hospital, paralyzed from the neck down. In the same hospital, the 71-year-old former deputy mayor, Nicholas Carbone, was upgraded to fair. Today, the Hartford Courant reports that beginning Monday, state police will begin a 15-week joint effort with Hartford police to combat crime. Operation Safe City 2008 will add 12 uniformed state troopers and two supervisors.
Link: http://www.boston.com/news/local/connecticut/articles/2008/06/08/hartford_stunned_by_callous_respon