Greeson: From escaped murderers to paint machines, we need local answers

Christopher Padgett
Christopher Padgett
photo Staff Photo by Dan Henry / The Chattanooga Times Free Press- 4/15/14. Staff Mugs
photo Christopher Padgett is charged with first-degree murder in the shooting death of Nathan Deere, a Chattanooga cab driver.
photo The Ooltewah High School football team practices on the football stadium field, where soccer nets are set to the side.
photo The home bleachers at the Lookout Valley High School football field are seen Wednesday, Sept. 9, 2015, in Chattanooga, Tenn. Hamilton County school officials are going to check concrete bleachers at several area school after the crumbling stadium at East Ridge High School was recently condemned.

What do you call a question that looms somewhere between literal and rhetorical?

Does it rank somewhere on the scale of nonsensical barroom wonderings about which is tougher to fight, a dragon or snakes on a plane?

Is it a North Georgia sole commissioner, a career politician, wondering about those fairly long-standing, pesky rules limiting how much money you can raise during your campaign?

Maybe it's somewhere near the dividing line between a couple of Hamilton County commissioners who believe painting lines in Ooltewah is more important than painting things in Lookout Valley?

The truth, like the difference, is constantly found in the details.

And that applies to all levels of government, be it the lone representative in Walker County or the chairman of the Hamilton County Commission.

Are there good people in public office? Absolutely. Lots of them, in fact, but not unlike the cliché of the rotten apples and the bunch, the good ones are too often tainted with the sour seeds of their not-so-public-minded contemporaries.

And it's on the committed and qualified public servants we have elected to not only continue their service, but to call out the misdeeds of other politicians.

With that, here's another question I bet many of you were asking yourselves last weekend: How can an accused killer out on bond and on trial for his crime go unmonitored?

Christopher Padgett was on trial for murder, for Pistol Pete's sake. And before anyone raises his hand about this budget decision or that funding issue, know this: We, the folks paying the taxes and doing the voting, are sick of excuses.

Padgett, 22, is a bad dude. After being convicted of first-degree felony murder in a shooting that left a Millennium Taxi Services driver dead in April 2012, he was sentenced to life in prison.

Padgett, who had been outfitted with a GPS monitor before his trial started, ditched the monitor and fled. He failed to show up for his sentencing.

Know this:

* GPS monitors are often used because our jails are too crowded. However, no one in Hamilton County monitors the GPS signals after regular business hours and on weekends. A criminal like Padgett can apparently pretty easily cut off the ankle device and give law enforcement and bonding company representatives the slip. Great. This sounds like a less-than-excellent option on all fronts.

* More than a few officials are happy to point fingers at this branch or that branch of government. So apparently no one wants to accept some responsibility for this massive foul-up.

* If we cannot fund the little things - like 24/7 monitoring of offenders with GPS monitors - how can we support major anti-violence efforts such as the Violence Reduction Initiative? Yes, the VRI is city-funded and GPS monitoring - or the lack thereof - is on the county and the sheriff. But for all of us, fighting crime has to be a collective effort.

It's mind-blowing, to be honest. In the hundreds of millions of dollars in our government budgets, there's not enough to pay an around-the-clock person to sit in front of a computer screen to track the whereabouts of those on GPS monitors? Do we have our priorities in the right place?

These answers seem simple, right? It's the questions - and those simply not answering them - that appear to be truly unbelievable.

Contact Jay Greeson at jgreeson@timesfreepress.com and 423-757-6343. His "Right to the Point" column runs Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays on A2.

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