באריכט דעקט אויף קאנספיראצע פון וויליזש

Boss Twieder of KJ should pull some weight, too

By Oliver Mackson
Times Herald-Record
omackson@th-record.com

The village of Harriman has about 2,200 people. It supports its own police department. So does Ellenville, a village of 4,100 in Ulster County. So does Monticello, the Sullivan County seat.
Kiryas Joel's bigger than all three put together. It's an Orange County village of about 15,000. It's bigger than some cities up here. But KJ doesn't have its own cops.
So while state agencies have taken a 5 percent whack in this year's budget, with more to come, state police have assigned a car to Kiryas Joel. The post is sometimes covered by troopers on overtime.
Major Al Martin commands the state police on this side of the Hudson. He's also on a regional counterterrorism committee. Since KJ is almost all Hasidic Jews, the thinking is that it's up there with reservoirs and malls on the terrorism risk list.
"We have more people at the reservoirs than we do anyplace else. Politics aside, the counterterrorism committee, which I am a part of, has deemed Kiryas Joel to be a target," says Martin, a straight shooter. "I'm telling you that this is the right thing to do."
Another right thing to do would be for Kiryas Joel to start pulling its weight on the safety front. The right thing would be for the village to form its own police department, to help bear some of the cost of keeping the post-9/11 world safe.
That isn't happening because of politics.
Mayor Abe Wieder is described even by rivals as a decent guy in matters of business. In politics, he's Boss Twieder. He's renowned and feared, even in Albany, for his command of thousands of KJ votes.
Lately, his juice has taken a hit because of the hard, brave work of dissident Hasidim embarrassed by the arrogance he shows to the outside world. On his watch, KJ's been the scene of voting fraud, shenanigans with housing and the hiring of a convicted felon as a security guard.
For years, if you went to the wrong synagogue or backed the wrong rabbi, there was also a good chance of catching a rock in your picture window.
That's changing. A dissident whom I'll call Fred, to save him trouble, is right when he says, "There's a lot of good being done in this village." He talks with such enthusiasm that his glasses and black skullcap nearly fly off his head.
But politics is still a rough sport in KJ. Fred worries that a police department would become just another tool for Boss Twieder and his cronies.
"That's the way it will work," he says. "That's why we don't want a police department here. We trust the state police."
Well, politicians can be stopped from using police departments to carry out vendettas. This is New York in 2003, not Alabama in 1953.
These are terrible times. There's a multibillion-dollar hole in the state budget. It's going to get bigger next year.
The fanatical religious thugs who murdered thousands of innocents in lower Manhattan have put Americans and Jews at the top of the al-Qaida hit list. But there are plenty of other targets. A century or so after the Crusades, al-Qaida still refers to Christians as "crusaders."
There are places up here where there's homegrown terror that demands a stepped-up police presence. I'm not saying troopers should lose overtime. I'm saying the need is more pressing in places like Newburgh, where there's been deadly gang violence.
In 2001, Boss Twieder survived the first contested election in KJ's history. He'll be challenged again, but not until 2005.
Long before then, Boss Twieder should be told that he's got to pick up the burden of making his villagers feel safe, the same way it's done anywhere else.
http://www.th-record.com/archive/2003/01/12/omcolumn.htm