Today Chief Laufer and Tom Hogan said things that I have written about for many years

Check through my blog posts. You will see several posts concerning Coatesville as a drug depot for Chester County. There are two basic reasons for this:

• We have a population of several thousand people here that are easy to intimidate. That is the families that have lived here for 100 years of more. Criminals can know every immediate family member and every extended family member, just like in Sicily.
• The same transportation links that make Coatesville an ideal place for commerce between the City of Lancaster and the City of Philadelphia make it easy to bring drugs in to Coatesville and distribute "packages" to the surrounding area.

Just the revitalization of Coatesville's shopping area can make the downtown safer by putting more people on the streets, more "eyes on the street".

Bringing new residents to Coatesville,  people not born and raised in Coatesville and therefore not easily intimidated,  can put "eyes on the street" that aren't easily intimidated. New "eyes on the street" can counteract the phenomena of, "A murder happening in front of eight people and no one saw it." Joe Carroll

Coatesville hopes to repeat homicide-free year

   

By MICHAEL N. PRICE, mprice@dailylocal.com
  

Tuesday, January 7, 2014
 “Coatesville has a reputation as a hub for Chester County’s drug trade” Chief Laufer
  

“The city council has to continue to support the police department, but much more important for city council though, is to revitalize that city. Nothing pushes the bad guys out like higher rent,” Hogan said.
  

“We can’t arrest Coatesville to revitalization. They need to attract businesses. We will support those businesses, we will keep it a safe place, but if you really want to keep the homicide numbers down over a long term basis you need to attract businesses and build up a stable middle class in Coatesville, like it once had,” Hogan said. 

Laufer agreed that the city’s long term answer to violence will not be found through enforcement, but through economic development.
  

“Unless the citizens feel safe, unless the people who come into the city feel safe to walk the streets, and unless the business people feel safe to come into the city to even up a business, it’s not going to happen,” he said. “That’s the role of the police department. We have to try to assure that people are going to feel safe in the city of Coatesville, that people are going to want to come here to patronize a restaurant or whatever the business may be. That the business owner feels safe or confident that he can open a business and be secure, and that families can feel safe to begin to move into the city. That’s the role of the police department in revitalization, but you’re not going to arrest your way to the turnaround of the city.”