Purzycki To Panhandlers: “Drop Dead!”

Filed in Delaware, Featured by on December 10, 2018

Let’s be honest: Mike Purzycki only represents people who come to Wilmington to build their already huge fortunes, but who don’t live here. People of substantial economic means who offend easily. People who apparently are offended by panhandlers. Not the circumstances that lead to the need to ask for money, but the people in such dire circumstances who have the nerve to ask the elite for pocket change.

Oh, Purzycki doesn’t come right out and say so, but his entire term has been devoted to fulfilling the dreams of Buccini/Pollin, regardless of how that impacts people who live in the City. Mayor Mike, of course, passes the buck:

Experts in the intersection of law and poverty said the practice is unusual, inhumane and ineffective. In an interview last week, Wilmington police Chief Robert Tracy stood by the practice. Mayor Mike Purzycki said he trusted the judgment of his Police Department and the courts.

In Buccini/Pollin World, the buck doesn’t stop with the mayor, and the bucks keep flowing into his campaign coffers.

Thankfully, and talk about two breaths of fresh air, incoming senators Darius Brown and Tizzie Lockman aren’t buying this inhumane doubletalk.

Senator Brown:

Incoming Sen. Darius Brown said panhandling points to “a systemic failure of education, criminal justice, health care and the economy.”

“We didn’t get here overnight, and we won’t fix it overnight either,” he said in an email. “But poverty isn’t somebody else’s problem, it’s our problem.”

Senator Lockman:

“To see people essentially being treated as blight is something I find to be alarming,” said Lockman, whose district covers downtown Wilmington. “It says something concerning about our values as a city, and as a state, that I think we need to reflect on.”

If they don’t already realize it, Brown and Lockman will soon possess levers to force changes in this policy. Levers with dollar signs attached. I encourage them to use those levers and, of course, to encourage a humane challenger to Buccini/Pollin’s mayor. One challenger.  Not five or six.

About the Author ()

Comments (31)

Trackback URL | Comments RSS Feed

  1. RE Vanella says:

    http://delawareliberal.net//2017/10/03/mike-purzycki-is-a-racist/

    Puppet enforcer for Bucini/Pollin and the rest of the capital interests. Allowed city bus routes to be rearranged at capital’s behest, accelerating gentrification, trying the speed-up sheriff sales of homes without a guarantee that owner occupied homes of the poorest, most vulnerable won’t be impacted, selling the 19th century Fire House in Forty Acres out from under the Firefighters’ Union to the same trash real estate company who built those gross monstrosities on the Brandywine (Monchanin Development)….

    …now this. Banning the poor from the city!

    He’s a piece shit, our mayor.

    • Hmm says:

      Unfortunately, this is exactly what I expected from him. Wilmington needs creative ideas, it needs to think about business development, but not at the expense of those who have always called it home.

      Hopefully he’ll start to be a little more considerate, 2020 should be interesting.

  2. Alby says:

    I find it rather amusing that the city’s biggest problem, if you go by journalism, is now panhandlers rather than shot-dead teens and young men.

    Amazingly, the drop in shootings has gained the mayor not one scintilla of good publicity. I wonder why that is?

  3. donviti says:

    Have you ever had one of them ask you for change? Approach you unbalanced and shuffling hands out? Walk past your car?

    If people are desperate enough, and toothless enough, to ask me for money in broad daylight I become ill at ease. I assume at some point my standard, response that , “I only have debit cards” Will be countered with, “No problem I have Venmo”

    I don’t know what percentage of them are drug addicts, but I assume it’s a high percentage. Desperate people do desperate things, and me being well off, driving a nice car, wearing nice clothes, etc. etc, and then turning them down is an uncomfortable situation.

    I want to visit the city, I want to dine, I want to go to the Blue rocks game and heckle 22 year old kids missing a 80 mile hour curve. I don’t want to stare blankly ahead and ignore the guy $3 away from his next high, hoping that his desperation doesn’t turn violent on me or my family. I assume a high number of people that do “donate” do so out of fear and less out of compassion. If they even come to the city at all anymore

    It’s a problem, it’s a nuisance, It doesn’t make me feel safe, and it needs to be dealt with.

    • Alby says:

      Yeah, any time I’m at the train station, and my initial reaction is the same as yours.

      You know the best way to deal with them? Actually talk to them as if they were, you know, human beings. Maybe give them a buck because an alcoholic is as dependent on it as a hungry person is. But even without the dollar, treating them decently is unlikely to cause any harm. And once I do, that nagging little worry about safety disappears.

    • delacrat says:

      “…. it needs to be dealt with.” – donviti

      Federal jobs guarantee

      Universal Basic Income

      • RE Vanella says:

        I think you missed a trick here re: the Don.

        Also, I’m not sold on UBI if it’s a way to axe other social programs. UBI came out of this Libertarian/Silicon Valley/Venture Capital set.

        Heard Derrick Hamilton speak on the jobs guarantee. I like what I’ve read too.

    • Hmm says:

      Seriously? Humanity has many sides to it, deal with it or go live in your suburban home and never leave.

  4. Arthur says:

    Are there no prisons? I take it the workhouses are still running?

  5. mediawatch says:

    As they say in real estate: location, location, location. You’ll notice they haven’t gone after the panhandlers who set up at 10th and Adams, by the on-ramp to 95 north, or by the 95 south exit ramp at 4th and Jackson. No concern about protecting residents of these areas from the panhandler pestilence. For me, that’s proof enough that this isn’t a really big problem, just a continuation of the Chemours/Buccini-Pollin war on poor people that started with moving the bus stops from Rodney Square. Also disappointed that Hageman and Maggitti, the ex-cops who run Downtown Visions, couldn’t take a more proactive approach, like giving these guys a yellow vest and a trash bag and offering them $12 an hour to clean up the streets. That would solve a couple of problems at once.

  6. RE Vanella says:

    I just walked to Walgreen’s for San Pellegrino. 2 bottles for $3!

    Guy at the bus stop on 8th street asked me for spare change. I gave him the 3 quarters I had on me.

    I can’t stop shaking.

    (part of this story is true)

  7. RE Vanella says:

    It’s Italian so it’s the very best. You of all people should know this.

  8. RE Vanella says:

    “The trick was using polls to convince voters to interpret political news through someone else’s eyes, instead of their own brains. You may like the policies of candidate X better, but “polls say” (this use of the passive voice is key) you should vote candidate Y, if you want to win the election. “

  9. RE Vanella says:

    “The trick works best with political minority groups, who’ve been trained to vote according to how they’re told a larger plurality thinks. Until pretty recently, if you were nonwhite, female, single, childless, or gay, you were typically told you had to choose between a slew of straight white candidates who “polls said” had an actual chance.”

  10. RE Vanella says:

    “There was a big lesson in this for everyone, or there should have been. Politics, despite the fact that it talks about itself as baseball all the time (“inside baseball” is the favored term of people who think they’re playing it), is not baseball. In baseball, batters don’t intentionally strike out because they’re told the pitcher has high strikeout rates.

    Data journalism works a check on conventional wisdom. When they combine is when you get problem. The two genres can be as hard to separate as humping dogs. Even after the Trump fiasco, the product of such unholy unions – “electability” – is still running loose.”

  11. RE Vanella says:

    Trying to teach you people is fucking exhausting. RV

    Just noticed these should be on the other thread. I’m tired and I have shit to do. You get the idea.

  12. nathan arizona says:

    Polls are sometimes unreliable, but I trust them more than anecdotal evidence from a relatively limited circle. I wouldn’t ignore them just because they don’t say what I want them to say. You can also research how the poll was put together, etc. Some are clearly more reliable than others.

    In baseball, it’s hard to hit pitchers “with a high strikeout rate” even If you’re trying.

  13. RE Vanella says:

    But you don’t not try.

    I ignore polls because they’re wholly irrelevant to what I’m doing … Utterly worthless.

  14. nathan arizona says:

    Fair enough. But would you explain again what you’re doing? And why you think it will work? Or maybe you couldn’t do that in a single post, which is also fair enough.

  15. RE Vanella says:

    I don’t do any activism, political work or make any donation to an advocacy organization or directly to an individual candidate based on what the “polls say” or what the media tell me my neighbour is doing.

    I write for and work for causes and candidates I think are correct and just and good and I couldn’t care less how popular they are or how they play will some engineered cohort of “likely voters.”

    (Please note: I never used the word vote. The 90 seconds one is in the voting booth isn’t necessarily the time to be an activist.)

    I think it will work because this is how it always has worked.

    Think of it as the opposite of reactionary.

    • Hmm says:

      Horse race is a very small part of polls. Polls at least polls you pay for are figuring out how to say what you want to say not to figure out what to say.

  16. nathan arizona says:

    OK. Thanks for answering.

  17. RE Vanella says:

    If Thadeus M Hammersmith of West Chester, PA & member of the Professional Managerial Class™ doesn’t support Medicare for All I’m not wasting my time searching for a candidate who is squishy in the topic to appease him. A candidate who won’t say the words or who makes some anodyne statement about “equal access.”

    I’m not interested in finding a candidate to please TM Hammersmith. I’m interested in convincing enough people to do it anyway.

    Maybe we convince Hammersmith along the way. Maybe we don’t. Ultimately it doesn’t matter.