As long as I could remember, my mom opened her mail with a switchblade knife. I never thought this was odd, and never really thought about it at all. My mom was a cop in Detroit. She joined the force in 1941, generally working vice, so maybe my tolerance for the unusual is higher than most. While visiting her a number of years back I watched as Mom began to open the mail. It suddenly struck me that very few 85-year-old women opened their mail with a switchblade, so I asked. Turns out she’d arrested a prostitute in about 1945, found the pearl-handled switchblade in the woman’s stocking, thought it was pretty, and pocketed it. Ethical issues aside (my “You stole it???!!” got a defensive reaction – with the hindsight of 55 years she knew she shouldn’t have) it is a pretty knife. Mom is gone now, as I’m guessing is the prostitute, and the knife is one of those freaky mementos that many families have.

The point? Having grown up with a switchblade-wielding, prize-winning sharpshooter police officer for a mom is a little different, and it’s also given me some valuable perspectives. The police have a special place in my heart, and I’ve always been keenly aware of issues affecting them. One issue confronting our department here in Iowa City is a lack of staff. Our police force is badly short of officers; we have 71. Champaign, IL with a nearly identical population, has 94. Waterloo, Iowa, slightly larger than Iowa City, has 80 patrol officers. Coralville, one-thid the population of Iowa City, has 29 officers.

This isn’t good for Iowa City’s businesses and residents. Not only do we have fewer officers on the street than we need, it means there are police-sponsored programs that we simply can’t staff, such as Neighborhood Watch. If elected to the City Council I promise to do all I can to convince my fellow councilors that this is an important need and one we need to address sooner, rather than later.