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| A city crew finally got around to finishing pothole repairs last week on the block of Euclid Avenue in Hackensack between Prospect and Summit avenues, above. |
By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR
Milton, Vt. Washington, our nation's capital. California and Maryland. Los Angeles.
Editor Marty Gottlieb of The Record tries mightily today to engage readers on Page 1 about the heroin crisis, fixing roads and expanding mass transit, gun control and a multimillionaire basketball-team owner who is a racist.
But all of it falls flat, and besides, who has the patience for all of these long analytical and speculative stories?
Readers want to know what's going on in their town, county and state.
More mall panic
On the Local front today, a follow-up to shoppers panicking at Westfield Garden State Plaza on Saturday night again emphasizes how little Paramus police can do to prevent such emergencies (L-1).
Who can forget how the borough Police Department was caught flat-footed by Richard Shoop of Teaneck, the gunman who invaded the shopping center last Nov. 4, fired random shots that panicked shoppers and then committed suicide?
Gottlieb and his incompetent local editors continue to ignore the abysmal lack of security provided by the wealthy Australian owner of the state's biggest shopping center.
Money trumps news
The Woodland Park daily and North Jersey Media Group should just admit their conflict of interest -- mall owner Westfield, and Macy's and other mall retailers are the source of millions of dollars in advertising revenue.
The spoiled Borg siblings are not about to bite the hand that feeds them by running news stories questioning why the mall owner puts profits above the safety of shoppers?
Traffic clowns
As if to emphasize the clownish nature of police in Paramus, a column on Sunday's Local front praised a sergeant who spends most of his time finding bogus inspection stickers and other infractions at Garden State Plaza.
Sunday's Road Warrior column about Sgt. Vinnie Pepe actually got better play than the initial news story on the false report of gunshots -- an account that made no reference to private mall security.
Staff Writer John Cichowski seems to think he had found a major crime buster in Pepe, head of the borough's traffic bureau:
"Besides that summons (for the bogus inspection sticker) Pepe issued six other tickets in a four-hour period -- three for speeding and three for parking in a handicapped spot."
Boy, that is really going to make me feel safer the next time I go to the Paramus mall.
Whose idea was it to run the news story on panic at the mall and Cichowski's silly Road Warrior column next to each other on the Local front?
School segregation
The best story in Sunday's paper was a recounting of school segregation in Teaneck and other towns 50 years ago (Sunday's A-1).
The township's Board of Education voted voluntarily in May 1964 to have children of all races attend sixth grade in one school.
On the continuation page, the story recounts the flight of white and black Engewood residents in 1955 after the state education commissioner ordered the city t0 redraw school boundary lines to end discrimination against black students (A-10 0n Sunday).
The black residents left [in the mid-1950s] because the schools were "not meeting their needs," said Sandy Greenberg, a former Englewood mayor.
But the story omits reporting that Englewood's middle and elementary schools remain segregated today, and that city officials are doing nothing about it.
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