Extreme measures needed in Y'town

About a month after Youngstown Mayor Jay Williams took office in January 2006, this space was dedicated to the issue of crime in the city. The column carried the following headline: "It takes courage to speak the truth." But the word courage was not directed at Williams or any other local government official.
Rather, it was used to describe an editorial that appeared in the Globe and Mail newspaper in Toronto, Canada, and a black member of the Toronto city council for telling the truth about the crime wave in that community.
Here's what the editorial said, in part:
"Go to Toronto's Yonge Street shopping area on any given day, and you will find groups of tough-looking men. Their dress is the dress of the urban ghetto culture; puffy down jackets, baseball caps or tuques, baggy pants, expensive running shoes. The tunes on their music players glorify violence and demean women. They speak in the same slang you might find on the streets of inner-city Chicago or Detroit. Their role models are 'gangsta' rappers like 50 Cent."
And here's the statement from Counselor Michael Thompson (remember, he's black):
"I'm not going to walk on eggshells about it. It's young people from a distinct community who are uninterested in being contributing members of society. ... The expectation is, 'let me get what I can as quickly as I can.' The fastest way to get there is crime and drugs."
Courageous positions that, unfortunately, did not inspire Youngstown's mayor or members of council.
Swarming
On May 21, a column headlined, "Swarmed! What would you do?" was published. It referred to an incident that occurred on Youngstown's North Side near Crandall Park. A female employee of The Vindicator driving on Fifth Avenue at night had stopped at a traffic light when her car was surrounded by a dozen black teenagers. The thugs pounded on the passenger window, the hood and trunk of her car after they saw her using her cell phone.
Again, the reaction from City Hall lacked a sense of urgency.
Then in June, a column with the headline "Y'town streets must be made safe" suggested that the city follow the example of other cities in the United States and Britain and install surveillance cameras in high crime areas and main thoroughfares.
Again, nothing from the those who are paid to take care of the health, safety and welfare of the citizenry.
Two months later, there was this headline: "Y'town should profile criminals."
Here's how the column began:
"When hundreds of people are forced to run for the exits because a gunman not only shoots his target to death, but does so in plain view of little children, that's terrorism.
"When senior citizens are afraid to venture out of their broiling homes because the streets have been turned into war zones by armed thugs, that's terrorism.
"And when a child sitting in what is thought to be the safety of his home is hit by a bullet that comes through an outside wall, that's terrorism."
The column called for profiling Youngstown's criminals. They are black males between the ages of 16 and 30 who, more often than not, have records that can be traced to juvenile hall.
Again, the silence from City Hall was deafening.
Murders
And so, last week's discovery of the execution-style murders of three men and a woman.
Suddenly, it's zero-tolerance time. Cops all over the streets, stopping drivers for even minor traffic infractions.
But unless the thugs in the city find out that they are not welcomed, they will not be dissuaded.
So, it's time to profile, to target and to round up society's misfits and let them rot in prison. Indeed, let's send them to Camp Guantanamo, the home of other terrorists.
It's time for surveillance cameras. It's time to prohibit groups of inner city youth from gathering on street corners. It's time to arbitrarily stop punks driving around in expensive SUVs, boom boxes blaring, and require them to show where they got the money to pay for the bling-bling. More often than not these are the drug dealers in the city.
It's time to apply the rules of national Homeland Security to Youngstown's insecurity.
In other words, it's time to conduct daily sweeps in high-crime areas. Law-abiding blacks have been asking for this action for years. They, after all, are the victims of this crime epidemic.
It's clear that the gangbangers, drug pushers and other criminals in the city share a common trait: they have no respect for life. Therefore, their lives should not matter, either.