Wednesday, September 28, 2011

P3i for Duluth

Duluth’s a nice place, I’m sure, but my only recollection of spending a month there one week during March several years ago is being pelted with horizontal freezing rain for about three straight days.  I was travelling with Jane and Steve, colleagues from our local domestic violence shelter, Friendship Home, and Lancaster County Adult Probation.  We were attending a training/planning session on improving our community response to domestic violence, taught by the renowned Ellen Pence.

Oh, wait, there was that lovely restaurant north of the City on the shores of Lake Superior.  Ellen sent us there, with instructions to ask for a specific server, Zoe, and to inform her: “We are here to end violence against women.”  A meal to-die-for ensued.   But I digress….

Chief of Police Gordon Ramsay and I have become acquainted over the past couple of years.  We’ve talked about various issues over the phone and email.  He reminds me of me, and I suspect its mutual.  Chief Ramsay is very interested in leveraging technology to work efficiently, and he learned of P3i via my blog.  We have offered to bring Duluth onto P3i during the remainder of our research grant, and we are working on that right now. Like Lincoln, Duluth is a customer of the Omega Group and crimemapping.com, and like me, Chief Ramsay is a big proponent of crime alerts as a means of keeping citizens informed about crime in their own back yard.

Looks like the Chief is both a new blogger, and writes a column for the local newspaper, the Duluth Tribune. That’s great public outreach, and I wish him well in the blogosphere.  It’s a challenge to keep up with fresh posts, but the pay off is huge when you let the public inside your office to see what’s on your mind. 

3 comments:

Steve said...

Tom:

If you're ever up there again, and have the misfortune to suffer from dental problems, there is a great place where you can get a dentist to fix you up; it's called (believe it or not) Duluth Tooth. :)

Anonymous said...

I remember the Duluth Police officer that gave me a warning ticket for running a stop sign. The sign was place about ten feet from the top of a very steep hill. If I remember correctly it all four of the streets had stop signs but the other three were on totally flat ground. Doing a legal stop on the uphill side would have been very tricky taking off again with a loaded truck. If your truck had the power to take off you had a very good chance of dropping a drive line. If you had an underpowered truck you would burn up a clutch and probably have to call a wrecker hook you up. I explained the predicament to the Duluth officer and he said he was aware of the problem. He was nice about it and just gave me a warning ticket. I have always wondered if that stop sign has been removed.

Gun Nut

Anonymous said...

That John Denver wrote catchy lyrics, didn't he?