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The Cincinnati Beacon
Hey Portune! just the facts, please!
Monday, October 08, 2007
Posted by The Dean of Cincinnati
In a recent interview with Justin Jeffre, Hamilton County Commission President Todd Portune accused people opposed to the jail plan of willfully misrepresenting the facts. His implication seems clear: the anti-jail side spreads lies, while the pro-jail side sticks with the truth. One must wonder, however, when Todd Portune purports to be speaking the truth whether he presents “the whole truth,” or just those portions that suit his issue du jour.
A recent Enquirer article reports that Portune teamed up with Republican Si Leis to try and scare people into supporting the new jail:
Hamilton County Sheriff Simon Leis Jr. and County Commissioner Todd Portune piled up a cache of recently confiscated assault weapons on Friday as high-power proof of the need to vote for the $736 million comprehensive jail plan on Nov. 6.
It was their response to tax opponents who filed a lawsuit accusing the sheriff of electioneering violations and handed out McDonald’s Big Macs to mock Issue 27 as a “super-sized jail tax.”
Portune challenged the public and the news media to see the “bigger picture” of an ongoing threat posed by violent criminals armed with such weaponry and by the county’s critical shortage of jail space to keep them locked up.
According to the Voorhis Report, which examined the charges that landed inmates in jail in 2004, weapons charges constituted 1.7% of the total for 1,000 inmates who were sampled. (The two biggest categories were “traffic charges,” with 42.7%, and “authority charges,” with 10.1%)
This information can be found on page 7.19 of the report.
So I must wonder at Todd Portune, for standing in front of a pile of “recently confiscated assault weapons.” Has the number of illegal assault weapons in Hamilton County dramatically increased since 2004? Or, as the Voorhis study indicates, are people in jail for weapons charges only 1.7% of the total?
If so, doesn’t it seem strange to focus on 1.7% of the jail population in an attempt to highlight an alleged “critical shortage of jail space”?
Am I really being asked to believe that psychopathic killers with arsenals of assault weapons are being let free so that people in jail on non-violent offenses can sit in a cell?
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