Newark Has A Good March...

...let's hope it lasts into April:

For the first time in more than 40 years, an entire calendar month has come and gone without a homicide in the state’s largest city.

It's been 32 days since a homicide took place in Newark, marking the first time there has been a slay-free calendar month in the city since 1966.

Police Director Garry McCarthy said he hopes to best a 43-day period from March to April of 2008, the longest span of time without a slaying in the city since 1961

While I'd like to give credit to Chris Christie, kudos must be extended to Mayor Cory Booker (D!), who actually is everything Barack Obama claimed to be . The son of Cary and Carolyn Booker, the first African-American executives at IBM, Booker was a high-school football star and went to college in England on a Rhodes Scholarship. Despite being upper-middle class and raised primarily in white neighborhoods, he moved into the Newark ghetto to get a first hand feel for what rank poverty was all about. No limousine liberal, he...

Booker defeated crooked Newark mayor Sharpe James (aka federal inmate number 28791-050) on his second try (he lost the first time as Sharpe's crew derided him as "not black enough"). And what has he done, besides reducing the crime rate? Over the last two years, he has refused to raise taxes (unlike the rest of Jersey) and has proposed cutting back city workers to 2006 levels. Most importantly: He turned down an offer from Obama to head his newly created White House Office of Urban Affairs Policy. A smart man, and a centrist. Not my choice for the next president, mind you, but you couldn't find a more common-sense Democrat operating with as little attention to ideology and as much attention to reality as Booker.

Meanwhile, in the capital of New Jersey -Trenton - things get worse and worse:

TRENTON — It started with a party invitation to a 15-year-old girl from some young men she knew. She took her 7-year-old stepsister to an apartment down the street from their home near the New Jersey Statehouse, where the girls had been hanging around outside on a Sunday afternoon.
For the younger girl, police say it quickly descended into a horrifying ordeal in which she was gang-raped by as many as seven men as her sister not only watched, but got paid by those who did it...

Inside apartment 13-C, police said the 7-year-old was soon left alone as her sister headed to a back bedroom to sell sex to several men. When she came out into the living room, she handed her 7-year-old sister money and encouraged her to let the men touch her.
"It went from touching to straight out assault and rape,"

All under the legislature's nose. Maybe 20-year mayor Doug Palmer is part of the problem there?