Angel Arce Torres got tossed in the air by a hit and run driver in Hartford CT and a video camera showed multiple cars and people driving and walking past his crumpled body in the street. A few days before a former deputy mayor got beaten senseless and faces brain surgery. The sickening PR response from Hartford PD got this fireball in reply from Colin McEnroe of the Hartford Courant.

Whose fault isn’t it? The police. The police never share any responsibility for anything bad that happens, although they are often to be thanked for certain statistical trends. And if you think I am unfairly ascribing these sentiments to [Hartford Chief of Police] Roberts, I give you his own words:

“There was a time they would have helped that man across the street. Now they mug and assault him,” he said. “That’s not a police problem. We no longer have a moral compass. Anything goes.”

Daryl Roberts has to be the only urban police chief in America who, when commenting on the savage beating of a 71-year-old civic leader, would say “That’s not a police problem.”

I grew up near Hartford and we moved back for 18 months before moving to San Francisco last month. The city has been circling the drain since the 60’s while the prosperous suburbs that surround it view it with contempt and refuse to do anything to help. It’s all about individual townships there. There are no county or regional governing agencies that can deal with problems on a wide basis. More than once I’d mention Hartford’s problems to someone in the suburbs and get “Hartford can rot for all I care” in return - a myopic, utterly selfish view to be sure, and one eventually certain to backfire on the suburbs.

But Hartford certainly needs no help screwing things up. McEnroe continues.

I remain disappointed in Roberts. As for Mayor Eddie Perez, he appears to have leaped from sociopathy into pure psychosis:

Sarah Barr, spokeswoman for Perez, said the mayor was unaware of Roberts’ comments, but added, “There are so many positive things that are happening in reference to moving forward and working together with the residents and fighting crime. I think it’s a sense of frustration on behalf of the chief.”

It’s those glass-half-full types who just wreck everything, isn’t it, Mr. Mayor? You know, the people who insist on focusing on the dead body lying on the sidewalk and completely ignoring the lovely peonies blooming in the nearby streetscape planter.

Some statistics. As of 2000, Hartford had the lowest per capita income and highest poverty rate of any town in Connecticut. One in six children has one or both parents in prison. They deserve better than they’re getting from their machine politics government and the do-nothing suburbs that surround them.

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Hartford CT has been struggling for decades. One big problem is that people and businesses leave, moving to nearby, vastly more prosperous suburbs. Since Connecticut has no county governments or regional authorities to spread money around, Hartford gets no help from anywhere should, say, a big insurance company move to the town next door.

So Hartford has to get money somewhere. And unfortunately, that means through extremely high property taxes. Which just drives more people and business out.

Hartford property taxes are the highest in the state by far, with a nosebleed rate of $64.8 per thousand dollars of assessment per year. Nearby towns with vastly better services have substantially lower (but still steep) property taxes.

It’s a death spiral. The exodus out of Hartford means higher taxes for remaining property owners, causing some of them to leave, and the situation continues to worsen.

A two or three unit apartment building in Hartford might cost $150,000 and get you $750 a month in rent per unit - but property taxes could easily total $600 a month, with no assurance they won’t rise. A similar building a few miles away in upscale West Hartford might cost $100,000 more, but the property tax rate is 30% less and you could probably get $1,300 a month in rent per unit. It’s easy to guess where most investors will put their money.

Hartford is like a boxer who absorbs crushing punches and keeps going, even as the knees wobble a bit. But if you’re continually on defensive, there’s no time to make a new move or mount a new attack. A decaying core city surrounded by a circle of better-off areas happens too often in the US. So, how does the urban core of a city like Hartford get revitalized?

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