.jpg)
New Smyrna Beach officials are not taking the recent crime wave lightly and had some strong words for would-be criminals in the wake of Saturday's fatal shooting of an armed masked-man who was shot dead after trying to rob a pharmacy.
"We need to send a strong message," City Commissioner Randy Richenberg said late Saturday night. "New Smyrna is not the place that you want to come to rob, steal, accost or anything else."
Mayor Sally Mackay went even further, saying she plans to huddle first thing Monday morning with City Manager John Hagood and Police Chief Ronald Pagano to demonstrate support for the city's public safety efforts in spite of tough fiscal times. "I am always concerned about the safety of the citizens of our city," the mayor said. "We have to maintain our first reponders on the street -- police and fire."
"We need to look at what happened and what extra measures we can take to stop this," she said of the crime wave that has stretched two weeks with several robberies, a violent carjacking of two teen girls, a high-speed chase, the beating of a man with a sawed-off shotgun, the robbery of a department store that resulted in a security officer being stabbed in the hand, a previous pharmacy robbery in a grocery store and the capture of a prowler breaking into vehicles.
City Commissioner Lynne Plaskett said now is not the time to be skimping on police and fire protection as some critics of the city administration have called for a tighter rein on spending. "You cannot put a price tag on the safety of our citizens," Plaskett said
City Commissioner and Vice Mayor Jack Grasty agreed, adding, "We cannot compromise on public safety -- no way."
More than 200 people showed up at last month's City Commission meeting, many of them there to support the police union's request for a 2 percent wage increase for 44 cops for fiscal 2008-'09, retroactive to Oct. 1, which the commission unanimously approved. It's the same increase the city's firefighters received earlier in the budgeting process.
City officials say they understand it's not just citizen safety, but also public perception of crime with merchants struggling economically, especially with the national recession.
"Historically, crime does go up when the economy goes bad," Richenberg said, which is precisely why, he and his colleagues voted for salary increases. Plaskett added: "We're very proud of the work they do because they are the ones putting their lives on the line for everyone else."