Community responds to failure
Jerry HoffmanTwo pedophiles walked away from the Mount Pleasant Center June 3. Although residents are supposed to be contacted through City Watch, many did not receive calls.
Ken Langton, center director, and Bill Yeagley, Public Safety director, along with members of a local group called Watchful Areawide Residents Notification Network presented opinions and facts to the commissioners.
The commissioners asked Yeagley and Langton to come to the meeting. WARNN members spoke during the public comment portion.
“The Mount Pleasant Center is the last of its kind in the state,” Langton said.
The center houses people with developmental disabilities as their main diagnosis. However, some clients also have a secondary diagnosis of a medical or mental illness.
“They are very complex in their care,” he said.
The center evaluated all the clients on the basis of how dangerous they are. If a dangerous patient is missing, he said, center staff call the police before they look for him.
“I’ve authorized a call to the police for certain people.”
Over the past three years, the clientele of the center has become increasingly more dangerous, although most of the clients the center serve are not violent, Langton said.
Clients come to the center as referrals from their local mental health agency or as court-ordered patients and those deemed incompetent to stand trial.
Judy Welsh, a representative of WARNN, said the residents of Mount Pleasant were in danger the night the two pedophiles left the center and were caught at the 7-Eleven, 302 W. Broomfield Road.
“Every child between the Mount Pleasant Center and (CMU) campus was in danger,” Welsh said.
She said the center could not be blamed for the problem, because it is mandated by the state.
WARNN has tried to work with state Rep. Sandy Caul to get more security at the center, but Caul said she believed it was not necessary, said Randy Golden, a WARNN representative.
“People are scared. After this last incident, I’ve heard more people talking about arming themselves,” Welsh said.
In an attempt to keep the community safe, Yeagley said the police department notified as many people as it could, using the City Watch system and foot officers, who put up posters as quickly as possible, faxes and calls to 24-hour businesses in the area.
The City Watch system didn’t function properly, he said. Some people did not receive calls, and some received the calls too late to make a difference.
“Recently, we discovered we had some problems with our database, and I’m confident we will have that fixed,” he said. “But (City Watch) is still not a cure-all.”
Many factors contributed to the failure of the system, he said, including the ability of residents to repeat the message, which goes out over six lines, the length of the message and the number of rings before a resident picks up the phone.
Yeagley said new residents need to let the police know if they want their numbers in the City Watch database, but there is no way to specify whether the resident wants calls only at certain times or circumstances.
“We’d rather give people information they don’t need, instead of not giving them enough.”
The City Watch system is tied in to the center, so Langton can access the message-recorder and get the system started as soon as possible, Yeagley said.
“While the system didn’t operate as perfectly as I’d like, there is nothing wrong with the system,” he said.
The Commission wants to put together an inter-governmental board with Isabella County and Union Township to discuss how to keep residents safe.
“We need to be realists. I’m asking our community not to panic. I believe the center is doing all it can, but no one is perfect. We’re going to be working together to make sure our community is safe and the Center is achieving their goals,” said Mayor Mike Pittsley.
In other news:
• Yeo & Yeo presented the Comprehensive Annual Financial Report for 2001.
“The City is in sound financial position,” said Mike Zimmerman, Yeo & Yeo representative.
• A public hearing is set for July 8 to hear comment on vacating Livingston Street from Lyons Street to Upton Street.
• Vice Mayor Adam Miller was appointed to the Open Space and Farmland Preservation Committee.
