Two shootings in Maplewood in 24 hours.

David Andreatta recently wrote an article in the D&C that Rochester averages one shooting every 32 hours.
The historic Maplewood neighborhood beat that average this week.
We had two shootings here, less than half a mile apart, in 24 hours.
The first was Thursday night on Ramona Park, which is a residential section of the neighborhood.
The second was last night on Dewey Avenue and Flower City Park.
That shooting took place near the neighborhood nuisance business called Phat Boy.
Phat Boy has long allowed drug dealers to ply their products in front of the store, and permitted their customers to use them in the parking lot behind their store.
The well tended neighborhood garden on the corner merely adds to the ambience of the experience, if the buyers aren't too high to notice.
The location has all the ingredients for a disaster to occur. It is surprising that worse hasn't happened there.
Yet.
The mayor's office and the police department are unable or unwilling to clear out the thugs loitering in front of the store. Phat Boy refuses to do anything about their presence. The neighborhood is helpless to do anything about it.
It is even more ironic that "Clergy on Patrol" roamed through that area less than a month ago.
Nobody really knows what "Clergy on Patrol" is supposed to do, other than provide the mayor's politicized preachers the opportunity to mug with her in front of the news cameras. That is their reward for preaching politics from the pulpit during her campaign. It certainly hasn't helped lessen violence and crime anywhere they have roamed.
Nor is the media willing to give these incidents anything more than perfunctory coverage. They are only too common in Rochester, as Andreatta's article pointed out.
Nobody was killed, either. No corpses littered the sidewalk. That might have produced a few tepid responses from the police, the mayor's office, elected officials and the neighborhood.
"Might have."
The police are fond of saying that these shootings are merely rival gangs shooting at each other.
That is to reassure us, since most residents aren't gang members and therefore we are safe.
Unless a stray bullet catches an innocent passerby, like on Parsells Avenue a few months ago.
The point of this rant?
The police like to say crime is down, but shootings are up. Clergy on Patrol is supposed to somehow deter violence, but it hasn't. We all say we abhor the violence that occurs in our city, but we have become accustomed to it. Unless we are one of the victims.
Our politicians are too unconcerned to care enough to enact legislation that will imprison these bastards for a good long time. They are afraid of either being branded racist or of selling out to whitey.
And the thugs merrily roam our streets, protected by political correctness.