Criminals declare moratorium on crime in Reading while awaiting the report of a blue-ribbon panel that will seal their demise

Unless you were occupied watching the solar eclipse on Sunday, you could not miss the biggest story to shoot down to Pottsville Pike since a lady fell in the fountain at the Berkshire Mall when sending a text message.

The Reading Eagle, once again leading the way as a community innovator, unveiled a bullet-proof plan to eliminate the crime wave that has been rotting at the heart of our city for years upon years.

This plan, simple on the surface, involves nothing more than a panel of community leaders sitting around in a big room discussing the crime problem and what needs to be done. Once they have finished chewing this over in their considerable cuds, with everyone in agreement 100% on a course of action, the meeting will adjourn, the plan put into action, and crime will go away, forever, poof.

It is remarkable that no one had thought of this strategy before. You can just imagine please Chief Bill Heim slapping his forehead and going "Damn!"

Even today, the Reading Eagle editorial board, consisting of middle-aged white boys who don't live in Reading, is rounding up the usual suspects to serve as conscripts on the committee: the mayor and his top cop; a union rep counterbalanced by someone from the Chamber of Commerce; a couple of ministers, Protestant; Albert Boscov, because he always has a seat on these things; Jynx Pagerly; the ghost of Mike O'Pake, who will leave after the obligatory photo-op; commissioners Christian Leinbach and Mark Scott, looking all glum and sour while admitting that this problem extends beyond the city borders; "educators" from the Reading school district; one or two Hispanic leaders, wearing hip boots; Kate Gosselin, because she has eight kids, but they won't allow her in; and Judy Schwank, Tom Caltagirone and what ever other state officials are in full politicking mode. Having the whole shebang televised live on BCTV will be the cherry atop the sundae.

The meeting will commence with testimony from Cotton Street individuals, who will kvetch about Mexicans and Dominicans tossing their Colt .45 empties on porch stoops before stabbing one another. After nodding up and down like bobbleheads and ignoring everything the residents have to say, the blue-ribbon pros will begin stoking their own great ideas.

Chief Heim will say he needs more cops on the streets. Once the laughter subsides, Judy Schwank will say she'll talk to the governor, but that he hates her.  (Collective 'Ahhhhh!") The "educators" will say they need better teachers, and Tom Caltagirone will empty his pockets and shrug, to show that nothing is there. ("No more taxes!" someone will shout.)

Some fellow packing heat will suggest that community crime watches get set up pronto and citizens arm themselves to the teeth and stalk anyone who looks suspicious wandering around their neighborhoods.

The audience will shimmer with glee.

But who am I to judge what will work and what will not? That is why we have this committee of experts. Once they make up their minds on what to do, it will happen, and crime will dry up, and the Pagoda will smile down on all of us.

The morning newspaper solves the crime problem in Reading, in a front-page editorial, lickety-split

Enough!

If things are going to improve in Reading, greater Reading and Berks County, the violence must stop now. One more murder, one more gunfight on the streets of our city is one too many.

That is how the Reading Eagle began its editorial this morning, ominously, with tremendous build-up, and you know it will surely be a tipping point in the history of Reading Eagle editorials because it is running on Page One.

The headline reads: "Mr. Mayor, community leaders: TAKE CHARGE!" The editorial board has brainstormed and come up with a solution for a problem that has plagued our city for decades upon decades.

Can you guess the results of their strategery?

1. Lobby the state legislature to legalize drugs, because drug trafficking and the resulting gang warfare are the leading cause of the crime epidemic.
2. Double the number of cops on the street, even if it means doubling city taxes, because taxes be damned when it comes to the citizens' safety.
3. Sprinkle pixie dust across our fair city, from the banks of the Schuylkill to Hampton Heights, from Fritz's Island to the Phillies ballpark.
4. Hold a public meeting and talk about the problem.
   

There was heavy support for option three. Dave Mowery endorsed the pixie dust, with Harry Deitz and Mark Nemerow dissenting. (They were not sure enough pixie dust could be imported from China in time.) Jim Homan was absent because he was at the Marvel Ranch ordering the grease burger with cholesterol sauce and thus could not gasbag in the discussion.

Here is our the editorial board's blueprint for making our city safe: 

We are calling on Mayor Vaughn Spencer to make this the priority of his administration. We are asking him to schedule a meeting of the key leaders of our community - not just the city - and not leave that room until there is a clear and supported plan to address the violence.

No long speeches, no pointing fingers, no assigning someone else to do it. Develop that plan and agree to leave that room committed - 100 percent - to fix this problem.

Anything less is unacceptable.

Problem solved. How can it fail? I mean, when The New York Times broke the story about Reading being the poorest city in the nation the Eagle proposed, and hosted, a public forum to discuss poverty. Now today, barely a few months later, poverty has been eradicated in Reading and all of the bodegas down on Chestnut Street have been converted into caviar shops and all of the single moms in the city are through with welfare and living the life of Reilly.

Once before, the morning paper ran a front-page opinion piece on crime in Reading, during the era of Mayor Joe Eppihimer's leadership, and I can still remember editor Chuck Gallagher harrumphng, both at the daily planning meeting and in print: "Do something! FER GAWD'S SAKE DO SOMETHING!!! I dunno what you're gonna do or what you can do, but do SOMETHING!!!

Harry Deitz and his team have mentored under this master. Soon, crime in Reading will be but a fleeting memory, all thanks to this editorial that framed the problem in a reasonable perspective.

The only thing that could throw a monkey wrench into this fit of genius is if Doonesbury lampooned it in a comic panel.

Brazen brat makes off with TV monitor from my campus

Do you recognize this lawbreaker?

If you did, would you have the cojones to turn him in?

Police said this fiend threw a rock though windows at two buildings on the Reading Area Community College campus - Berks Hall and the Student Union Building - shortly before 11 p.m. on May 6 and escaped into the night with a flat-screen TV that had been mounted on a wall.

Investigators said the burglar has a tattoo on his right hand, although this surveillance video does not reveal if it is a dragon tattoo.

Look closely. Does he live on your block? Give him up.

Criminals spill across Penn Street Bridge from city, turn West Reading into a living hell

Coppers reenact the exodus of miscreants from their lair in Reading to its innocent neighbor to the west.You can't paint a better picture of the quaint, vibrant Berks County community.

West Reading -- where specialty shops male it a Manayunk on the Schuylkill; its peach trees and magnolias in full blossom; home to pizza to die for -- is not a place where strollers expect to encounter thug lifers wielding sharp, pointy instruments of menace.

Oh, no?

Here is what the newspaper reported happened yesterday:

Police broke up a large brawl Wednesday in the 400 block of Chestnut Street in West Reading and took several people in for questioning.

Borough police received reports of a large brawl involving knives less than a block away from the borough hall about 5:45 p.m., according to Berks County 9-1-1 dispatchers.

The first officers on the scene called for backup from city police.

A city K-9 unit was among the first to arrive and the brawl quickly broke up.

No one had been charged as of deadline.

A West Reading officer said he did not think anyone was stabbed or seriously injured.

He didn't "think anyone was stabbed"? Keep moving, nothing to see here.

This is just a hop, skip and fall over dead from the GoggleWorks, where the corpse of a gentleman was discovered Wednesday with a bullet wound to the back.

It might have something to do with the Bermuda Triangle of death and mayhem that runs along the river.

Spencer plans to trim crime in Reading by telling criminals they'll need to commute to commit their crimes

Why didn't anybody think of this before?

Vaughn Spencer, the next mayor of the city of Reading, has served up his five-step plan to rejuvenate the city (12 steps are bullet-listed in the morning paper), including a proposal to make it illegal for certain types of felons to even live within the city borders.

This will surely work!

Remember how certain states made it difficult for illegal immigrants to stick around, and you saw what happened, veggies rotted on their vines. (What will rot here when the outlaw exodus from Reading commences?)

Because this radical scheme would require a change in state law, Spencer promised to lobby Harrisburg. The city will probably need to hire a lobbyist. Job creators!

The only question is whether it will become a felony for felons to shack out in Reading or something like a summary offense, where they'll pay a fine before Wally Scott.

In related logic, the House Republicans passed a bill that would make it OK for hospital emergency rooms to turn away women bleeding to death from miscarriages, this creating jobs. If just a quarter of the 900,000 women who succumb held jobs, that would open up those slot to other jobless.

Weekend open thread

If you can't beat the heat, turn on the heat.

If Casey Anthony had been convicted, she would have had a strong argument on appeal

Not only did the prosecution screw up the number of times the defendant searched for the word "chloroform" online, they withheld the exculpatory evidence from the defense!

The New York Times reports:

MIAMI — Assertions by the prosecution that Casey Anthony conducted extensive computer searches on the word “chloroform” were based on inaccurate data, a software designer who testified at the trial said Monday.

The designer, John Bradley, said Ms. Anthony had visited what the prosecution said was a crucial Web site only once, not 84 times, as prosecutors had asserted. He came to that conclusion after redesigning his software, and immediately alerted prosecutors and the police about the mistake, he said.

The finding of 84 visits was used repeatedly during the trial to suggest that Ms. Anthony had planned to murder her 2-year-old daughter, Caylee, who was found dead in 2008. Ms. Anthony, who could have faced the death penalty, was acquitted of the killing on July 5.

According to Mr. Bradley, chief software developer of CacheBack, used by the police to verify the computer searches, the term “chloroform” was searched once through Google. The Google search then led to a Web site, sci-spot.com, that was visited only once, Mr. Bradley added. The Web site offered information on the use of chloroform in the 1800s.

The Orange County Sheriff’s Office had used the software to validate its finding that Ms. Anthony had searched for information about chloroform 84 times, a conclusion that Mr. Bradley says turned out to be wrong. Mr. Bradley said he immediately alerted a prosecutor, Linda Drane Burdick, and Sgt. Kevin Stenger of the Sheriff’s Office in late June through e-mail and by telephone to tell them of his new findings. Mr. Bradley said he conducted a second analysis after discovering discrepancies that were never brought to his attention by prosecutors or the police.

Mr. Bradley’s findings were not presented to the jury and the record was never corrected, he said. Prosecutors are required to reveal all information that is exculpatory to the defense.

“I gave the police everything they needed to present a new report,” Mr. Bradley said. “I did the work myself and copied out the entire database in a spreadsheet to make sure there was no issue of accessibility to the data.”

Mr. Bradley, chief executive of Siquest, a Canadian company, said he even volunteered to fly to Orlando at his own expense to show them the findings.

Cheney Mason, one of Ms. Anthony’s defense lawyers, said it was “outrageous” that prosecutors withheld critical information on the “chloroform” searches.

“The prosecution is absolutely obligated to bring forth to the court any and all evidence that could be exculpatory,” Mr. Mason said. “If in fact this is true, and the prosecution concealed this new information, it is more than shame on them. It is outrageous.”

“This was a major part of their case,” Mr. Mason added.

This is not pretty.