High and Jackson Must Resign!

August 13th, 2008 by Kenneth Burns

It has been 15 days and counting since the flawed police operation on the home of Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye Calvo.

In an update on the infowar since my column from this past Monday on PolitickerMD.com, The Gazette’s Prince George’s County’s editorial board in their opinion this week said that a gigantic red flag should be waving about the overall management of public safety in Prince George’s County.

The editors stated that “it would be unfair to judge the county’s public safety by the tragically overzealous actions of one branch. However, when you look at each department, the picture gets grimmer.” They go on to recap the fact Prince George’s County police chief Melvin High announced his resignation at the end of this month amid news that crime in the county decreased only 1.7 percent from the previous year so far with 58 homicides, second to Baltimore City.

They also list 19-year-old Ronnie White being found dead while in custody of the county corrections department, the director of that department being fired earlier that month after four guns went missing from a locked armory. Before that, corrections officers were accused of smuggling cell phones to gang members and having inappropriate relations with inmates. The cherry on top of this was finding disgraced county homeland security official Keith Washington and another inmate in possesion of handcuff keys.

While they echoed my sentiment that the acts of a vocal minority should not be a black mark on those who faithfully put their lives on the line while following the rules, they did not call for any resignations. They did however say that county authorities to check whether they should change protocols and the way the departments are wrong.

Maryland Politics Today is calling for the immediate resignation of Prince George’s County police chief Melvin High and county sheriff Michael A. Jackson. We also are calling for them to apologize to Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye Calvo and his family.

I encourage you to keep the letters coming into the the newspapers and keep the issue alive! The Gazette, although I wish their opinion went further, wrote a well thought out editorial. Urge the editorial boards of the other papers in the area to call out county leadership on it’s dismal management of public safety, but crime in particular.