The program has its roots in a plague of gun violence in Richmond a decade ago. Forty-seven murders in 2007 made the city, per-capita, the sixth-most dangerous city in the United States.

Leaders of the mostly African American city in west Contra Costa County were desperate to break the cycle of violence. They seized on a proposal from a city official, DeVone Boggan, and established a city Office of Neighborhood Safety. Here’s an account from the Washington Post’s March 26 story:

Boggan, who had lost a brother in a shooting in Michigan, came up with the core of the program after reading about a paid business school fellowship. He wondered whether troubled young men couldn’t be approached the same way and be paid to improve their lives. But he had to raise the money because he couldn’t persuade officials to give tax dollars directly to violent firearms offenders.

 

He hired men who had served time across San Francisco Bay at California’s San Quentin State Prison, often for their own gun crimes on the streets of Richmond.

 

Boggan and his streetwise crew of ex-cons selected an initial group of 21 gang members and suspected criminals for the program. One night in 2010, he persuaded them to come to City Hall, where he invited them to work with mentors and plan a future without guns. As they left, Boggan surprised each one with $1,000 — no strings attached.

 

“No cop had ever handed them money without asking for something in return,” Boggan said. “And it had the intended effect. It sent a shock wave through the community. People sat up and began watching.”

According to Boggan, who runs the Office of Neighborhood Safety, 84 of the 88 at-risk men who have participated in the program are still alive. While some Richmond City Council members are skeptical, the current mayor and the last two police chiefs have come around to Boggan’s initiative. They credit it with removing Richmond from the list of most dangerous cities. There were just 11 murders in 2014, though numbers went up significantly in 2015, as they did in many U.S. cities.

D.C. mayor hints Richmond is exaggerating its success

Washington is one of those cities, which is why the Post is interested in the Richmond program. D.C. officials are fighting over whether to implement the same or a very similar program, except using taxpayer funds. Council members are more enamored of the idea than Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser and Police Chief Cathy Lanier. They are so skeptical that they hint that Richmond is inflating its success.

“There’s never been a real evaluation of the program,” Lanier told the Post. “They didn’t design the program to allow it to be evaluated,” a Bowser aide told the newspaper.

In a 2014 story about Richmond’s plunging murder rate, city officials interviewed by the Contra Costa Times credited a variety of reasons for the drop — never mentioning that potentially violent young men are actually paid to keep peaceful.

On the police side, [Police Chief Chris Magnus] has reformed a long-beleaguered department with an infusion of young officers, a focus on data-driven resource deployment and an emphasis on building community trust.

 

“We don’t cast a wide net or move into hot spots like an occupying force, which fosters distrust among community partners,” Magnus said. “We are surgical; we concentrate on people that need to be focused on.”

 

At the same time, the ONS employs agents who build relationships with more than 60 young men and teens, identified through criminal records and other data as potential violent offenders. The program includes educational, counseling and job-placement support.

 

Operation Ceasefire, a volunteer campaign, helps give former gang members and violent offenders job training and counseling.

This sort of coverage, with its omission of any reference to the anti-crime payments, may well have come to Bowser’s and Lanier’s attention. If Richmond officials brag about the success of the payments to non-local media, but not to local media, that suggests a fear of scrutiny.

Yet this from the Washington Post:

“Residents and business owners in parts of upper Northwest Washington are being advised to continue boiling their water through Friday after a pumping station lost power, leaving hundreds in the area with low water pressure.”

How can these people, who can’t produce potable water for themselves, insist on telling the rest of us what to do? The Feds control not only the federal government, but effectively the state and local governments, too.

Ever attend a local school board? They mainly discuss how to meet state mandates, which in turn come from the feds.

In California, Proposition 98 mandates that 40 percent of state funds must go to K-14 schooling. Yet schools largely must follow rules set by the following, in this order:

• U.S. Supreme Court decisions;
• Federal regulations from the U.S. Department of Education (De-Ed);
• Lobbying by  the national teachers’ unions, mainly the National Education Association/California Teachers Association and the American Federation of Teachers/California Federation of Teachers — whose money comes from dues provided by taxpayer-funded teacher salaries.

The same is true in all other fields: Our lives are completely run by federal agencies: EPA, DOT, Commerce, Interior, Energy, HHS, HUD, DoJ, Treasury, Labor — as we relentlessly are spied on by the NSA, FBI, CIA, Homeland Security, DoD, etc.

But these people can’t even provide themselves with clean water!

By John Seiler

Until recently, Silicon Valley enjoyed the highest median income in the United States. That makes sense. The world’s most vibrant industry is run by 180-IQ nerds who pull down millions and billions.

Not anymore. Now the highest-income area is Washington, D.C.:

“Wealth in Washington, DC has surged to the highest median income in the United States, surpassing even tech mecca Silicon Valley, California.

“With a median household income of $119,134, the Census Bureau reports that Loudoun County, Virginia now occupies the number one spot for the highest median U.S. income. The number two position belongs to Fairfax County, Virginia at $105,797. Arlington, Virginia comes in third at $100,735.”

In fact, seven of the 10 counties with the highest household incomes are in the Washington region.

The “wealth surge” for D.C. occurred even as the rest of the country, including Silicon Valley, suffered the worst recession since the Great Depression.

During good times, D.C. grabs an increasing share of the bounty, and grows and grows. During bad times, D.C. “saves” the economy by “helping” us, as it grows and grows and grows.

But D.C. is just a parasite. All those politicians, lobbyists and bureaucrats don’t produce anything. They drink our blood, draining us of our life’s substance while they get fat and party like a gang of ghouls.

I grew up near Detroit, which used to be the richest area in the country, even the world. It was an industrial powerhouse, “the arsenal of Democracy.” It was an area where even the middle-class was well off; anyone could get a decent job. Now the median income in Detroit is just $26,090 and the city is an example of urban destruction. Why? Because most of its wealth has been siphoned off to D.C.

Top 10 Counties

Here’s the top 10 list of counties by median income:

The only three not from the D.C. area are Hunterdon and Somerset, N.J, where rich folks live; and Douglas, CO, a “horse country” area southeast of Denver.

All seven other counties in the top 10, including the top three, are living high off the hog on your money after they rob it from you.

Bob Hope once joked, “I like to got to Washington so I can be near my money.”

President Obama last year won re-election on a solemn promise to force the rich “to pay their fair share.” Republicans agreed with him with their Fiscal Cliff deal on Jan. 1. But it turned out that “the rich” meant 77 percent of Americans!

Basically, what happened is that, once again, middle-class Americans were tricked into voting for politicians who forced us to give another blood donation, the money not going to “the poor,” but to the D.C. vampires.