Mayor Butt Makes an Ass of the City of Richmond
Richmond Mayor Tom Butt made a faux pas recently, after sending a mass email to his constituents celebrating the fact that the City of Richmond had been left off a list of Northern California’s most dangerous cities.
Unfortunately for Mayor Butt, Richmond should have ranked fifth on the list (just behind Vallejo). The city was only left off as it had failed to send its yearly crime statistics to the FBI, due to a “significant data loss in November 2015 as a result of a combination of human neglect and software failure,” said Police Chief Allwyn Brown.
Once the crime rates were released, it was learned that violent crimes in Richmond were up almost 13 percent from 2014 to 2015. The homicide rate had increased by 91 percent, with 11 deaths reported in 2014, and 21 in 2015. The good news (if you can call it that) is that “overall crimes” were down a whopping one percent.
The reason for an uptick in homicides, according to Richmond Lieutenant Felix Tan, is an increase in gang violence. “It’s gang on gang,” Tan said. “There are a lot of old feuds that are happening.”
Read more: http://www.sfweekly.com/news/snitch/mayor-butt-makes-ass-city-richmond/