And now for some good news.
Yeah, that's right. Good news. And its genesis is from Chattanooga's finest.
The media gets criticized for focusing on the bad. The bad news sells. The sad news gets retweeted. Remember, we cover plane crashes, not safe landings.
Jay GreesonBut we also offer balance by calling attention to good work with the same volume and vigor.
Shootings are down in the city. Murders are down in the city.
In a time when gun control is likely the second-most contentious point in our country behind race, our Chattanooga police officers are doing a great job at controlling the people in control of the guns.
This is an important part of the gun-control argument that frequently gets eschewed by folks who simply want to ban every gun that shoots anything harder than water.
In Parkland, Fla., the authorities messed up royally. In the Nashville-area Waffle House case, law enforcement went to the wrong restaurant, and the damage would have been way worse without the extraordinary efforts of James Shaw Jr.
In Chattanooga, the wrong people having guns still is an issue.
But the numbers - as reported by staff writer Emmett Gienapp on Sunday - tell a positive tale.
The numbers are striking and should be applauded from on high.
Maybe it started with the creative use of the RICO Act to arrest 54 gangbangers earlier this year. Those dudes off the street certainly could not hurt the shooting statistics Gienapp referenced last weekend.
And in case you missed it, the six homicides as of May 6 were fewer than half of last year. Shootings in general, through May 6, were substantially improved, with nine gang-related shootings this year compared to 41 last year and 22 total shootings year-to-date compared to almost four times that many last year.
Of course there are going to be folks poking at the numbers.
Summer is coming and the heat means more shootings, some will say. When some of the Chatta-RICO 54 are released, what will the shooting trend lines be, some negative-Nellys may bemoan. What about other crime stats, a few may ask.
"The problem is this: you're only one small spark away from a big beef happening and things kind of going awry," Sgt. Josh May, head of the Chattanooga Police Department's new gun unit, told Geinapp. "You're hoping that you've planted enough roots out here to quell anything like that that would happen and be able to stop it before anything spirals out of control."
And that is certainly possible. Twain told us there are "Lies, damn lies and statistics" and they could turn in the complete opposite direction with a firefight on Dodds Avenue next month.
Sure, the summer heat may mean more violence and yes, when criminals and gang-bangers get back on the streets, who knows what will happen? And while I hope no one is ever mugged on the streets of Utopia and no one every gets robbed in the ZIP Code of Never Neverland, I do know that no one has ever been killed by the stray TV set from a burglary.
Police chief David Roddy and his team - led by Sgt. May and Victor Miller, the homicide unit supervisor - are doing a bang-up job fighting violent crime, and they are doing better with communicating among their departments and in our communities. They did it with creativity and old-fashioned dedication.
That, friends, is progress, and that is better than good news.
It's great news.
Contact Jay Greeson at jgreeson@timesfreepress.com and 423-757-6343.