Crime is WAY down in Ogden... Scout's Honor

Standard-Examiner publisher Lee Carter expesses his "special" Thanksgiving thanks for Ogden City's crime fighting team, Chief Greiner and Boss Godfrey

Just for sake of archival consistency, we'll highlight two items appearing in this morning's Standard-Examiner, which fall into the well-travelled Weber County Forum topic category, Godfrey the Crime Fighter.

First, the SE carries this front page Scott Schwebke story, wherein Chief Greiner pats himself on the back for a purported 23% crime reduction and then whines about Ogden's "parolee problem":

“It’s not fair to the citizens of this community,” Greiner said of the inordinate amount of parolees in the city. “It’s not fair to have to police them.”

And our readers won't want to miss this morning's Boss Godfrey guest commentary, wherein the Crime Fighter Hisself ushers himself into view, for a share of the spotlight:

I think Ogden's story is important because it tells other communities that the right plan and implementation can change the paradigm. One of the reasons I ran for this office was because a former city official told me that "you can't do anything to change crime. It has always occurred and always will."
I'm surprised at how many people really believe that, especially when there have been remarkable changes in other high-profile cities like New York City. Crime will always exist in New York City as it will in Ogden, but we can significantly reduce crime. In fact we have done so.
There will be some that won't believe that Ogden is as good as I'm painting it to be. To them I ask that they come to Ogden and see for themselves. Walk our streets and experience the change. There is much more for us to do in Ogden, but we are encouraged by the progress.

Mercifully, neither of these items is bogged down by charts, graphs or much in the way of verifiable substantive data. Godfrey has tried citing real data before of course, with very unfortunate results.

As for the SE's reason for the timing of these two articles, we can only speculate:

It's Thanksgiving eve, gentle readers... and SE Publisher Lee "Gondola Boy" Carter was perhaps overdue in expressing his perfunctory "special thanks." Perhaps these two items were stuck in a SE email inbox somewhere, since prior to the election.

And here's the truly sad part, we believe. With Boss Godfrey's long history of dissembling, spinning and prevaricating, even his remaining supporters don't know what to believe.