We’ve now had two weeks to come to terms with the Marathon Bombing and our collective reactions to it. I am particularly concerned about the response of the government and the mainstream mass media. I think it’s time we have a conversation about the role of passion and priorities in public policy.
I would like to highlight three different episodes to contrast and compare with the Marathon Bombing. I suggest that each of the three arguably reveals a more important and more urgent failure of public policy. I want to explicitly include the treatment by the mainstream media — especially the Boston Globe — in this discussion.
Here are the three other events I’d like to consider:
1. The NECC/Ameridose Scandal
2. The Massachusetts Drug Lab Scandal
3. This weekend’s fatal fire at 87 Linden Street in Allston.
I suggest that each of these three reveals a far more significant failure of government. The death toll from the NECC scandal is 48 and counting. The drug lab scandal puts an enormous number of dangerous offenders back on the street. I believe the scale of that scandal betrays the eagerness of overly aggressive prosecutors to gain convictions at any cost. I am confident that authorities knew that Ms. Dookhan was manufacturing results favorable to the prosecution, and carefully looked the other way. Finally, the fatal fire at 87 Linden Street occurred in a “two family” house that had an astounding NINETEEN students living in it. A similar fire gutted a similarly overcrowded property at 84 Linden Street in January of 2012. City officials claim they didn’t know about the overcrowding at this most recent fatal fire.
How many inspections of rental properties in Allston would even ONE of the expensive high-tech “No Smoking” signs scattered throughout the MBTA have provided? You know, the expensive high-tech signs that were supposed to provide vital information in the case of a terrorist emergency? The ones that flashed their meaningless messages on empty platforms because the entire system had been shut down to apprehend one wounded and bleeding suspect.
How many drug lab inspectors could have been hired with the money that bought the impressive fleet of hundreds of swat vehicles, the thousands of responders, and all the weapons, ammunition, communication devices, and everything else that provided our “security” that Friday? How much did shutting down the entire city of Boston cost all of us, when we include lost wages, lost business, spoiled restaurant food, ALL of it. How much “public safety” did we buy with that all that money? How does that total compare with the delta between the Governor’s tax proposal and Mr. DeLeo’s meager counter-offer? Would we have been more safe with twice as many responders? How about half?
How do we measure the improvements in “public safety” we derive from all these enormous expenditures in police and military preparedness for our “war on terror”?
It seems to me that government in Massachusetts is failing at its most basic purposes. Criminals are going free. Students are dying in fires in unregulated housing. Patients are dying from polluted medications distributed nationwide by unregulated medical suppliers. All this happens while we contemplate ever more intrusive “security” measures while shouting down those who dare to suggest that we’ve already gone too far.
I’d like to see media like the Globe redouble their efforts to reassert their adversarial status with government and authority. I’d like to see less front-page handwringing and more investigative pieces that pick up where Brian Ballou started.
How does a rental property go more than twenty years with only two inspections? What government officials are charged with inspecting properties in Allston, or compounding companies in Framingham, or state drug labs? Did those inspections fail because there weren’t enough inspectors? Did the inspectors lack the resources needed to do their jobs?
Where is our government investing its resources, what priorities do those investments reflect, and do those priorities line up with our genuine (as opposed to maudlin) passions?
As always it gives far more attention to the perpetrators than to the victims. Tom is right to point out the criminal negligence in Allston, the drug scandal, and all in our own back yard. Not to mention the negligence that killed so many in West, Texas. I am sure there are other oil drums and gas storage facilities in more populated areas (looking at you Danvers, Everett) and we need to secure them, inspect them, and regulate them. Public safety is not just a massive police and military manhunt for terrorists, it’s also the mundane activities of food and drug inspection, building inspection, and chemical inspection. Activities all cutting severely cut by the sequester I might add.