Update of Berdoo T-shirt
Just chatted with police officer Lyle Reyes, the man who sold hundreds of T-shirts this year lampooning gang violence in the city.
Reyes said he hasn't come out with any new shirts for the holidays. He said the discontinuation - Reyes told me two months ago that he hoped to come out with Holiday designs of the macabre shirts - was not due to any pressure from union or police leaders, but because he had been busy with personal issues lately.
Reyes doesn't talk to this reporter as freely as he did before I wrote the first story about his side-business. Not sure exactly why, but he seems like an unassuming guy and probably took a lot of flak for selling T-shirts that present the city in such a negative light.
Has anyone out there seen any of the Berdoo "Murder Capital" type T-shirts??
To answer your question, no I haven't seen any. I wish I would, I want one!
Yes they are great!
I want one too. Where can I get one?
I have one of these cool T shirts and a hat with the 187 logo on the back. I would suggest to mr. Reyes that in addition to this existing T shirt and hat, that he change the wood stump or branch that the masked vultures are sitting on. My suggestion would be to have the vultures sitting on a caricature of the "Phoenix" bird.
In this manner, it would now have a double meaning and the vultures would not be gangsters, but, instead be those who believe they can continue to prey upon the taxpayers to finance this government run social program that should now bear the title "Phoenix-Albatross".
How many of you really believe this City government can run a social program better that a church or a non-profit organization. Like many other charities, the percentage of any dollar given is largely eaten up by the administrative costs.
As an example, look at the Director of Phoenix, Baude, formerly Director of our CODE Dept. His salary has got to be 100 GRAND including benefits, And the rest of CODE is running on automatic pilot as far as the rest of the NON-Phoenix areas go. Now, there is the salary of Marianne(you remember, the Mayor gave her an appointment to what was previously a non-existent job in CODE). She has got to be costing us another 100 Grand, Mr. Paxton, another appointee for Phoenix, another 100 GRand. NOW, last but not the latest in this waste of taxpayer money, is Mr. Rawls. he costs us $6000 per week as a consultant, plus whatever other expenses the City(US) will give him such as a phone, gas card, maybe a car, an expense account?, an office with a City paid staff? That $6000 for this 24 year old young man that came from JOE BACA, amounts to $37.50 per hour IF he works 40 hours. If he works 30 hours, it is $50 per hour and goes up incrementally. All these salary expenses plus the other hundreds of thousands of dollars that this social program is costing us is money that could have been used to fix the existing problems in our crime ridden City. Did you see how well Phoenix worked last year? Well, at least 56 homocide victims will not know that it was again, a record year. It probably would have been more, but some of the bodies were probably moved a few feet into county pockets so our so called "lower crime" rate would not be noticed as much.