Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke pledged in his State of the City address Monday to spend $1 million over the next two years to invest in public safety measures that would help combat the type of gun violence the city has experienced over the past two weeks.
He has no guarantee that a pledge to spend $10 million would alleviate the problem, but he has to try. A city voted in a magazine contest last year as Best Town Ever should do no less.
Unfortunately, like the radical Muslims populating the Islamic State in the Middle East, Berke is dealing with a relatively small number of bad people amid a sea of good ones. Yet, he must deal with not only the perpetrators of the violence but also the witnesses too scared to speak up about what they saw and a community that feels powerless to change its lot.
The $1 million expenditure will cover both cameras that will be deployed – with the help of neighborhood leaders and clergy – in problem areas and information technology infrastructure for the police department. The hope is that additional cameras – on churches, in neighborhoods and elsewhere – might be linked to a system to give police a better eye on the streets and on the cars that travel it.
Is Big Brother watching? Well, not exactly.