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Booker: No 9PM Armed Guards For Newark's Restaurants
By
Garth Johnston
Published Jul 19, 2011
Modified Jul 19, 2011
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By
Garth Johnston
Published Jul 19, 2011
Modified Jul 19, 2011
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Two weeks ago the Newark City Council voted to require all restaurants that served fewer than 20 guests to have an armed guard on premises if they were open past 9 p.m. However, yesterday Newark's mayor, Cory Booker, vetoed the plan. At a press conference today, Booker explained his thinking: "There are many businesses that would be caught up in these extreme costs associated with armed security that never even had these problems in their neighborhoods."
Booker has now kicked the ball back to the Council's court, arguing that they can make "a piece of narrowly tailored legislation that will stand up to legal challenge." The current proposal, he says, would not. To prove the point Booker pointed to statistics that showed that the joints in question (mostly fried chicken and Chinese restaurants) only account for two percent of the city's infamously violent crime.
Further, he said he was troubled that the ordinance was too broad and would be an unfair tax to businesses which had not suffered from violent incidents but would still have to pay for security—an expense that can cost $30 an hour or more. In a letter accompanying his veto Booker wrote that “Saddling a wide swath of our businesses, many of them Newark resident-owned, with arbitrary and substantial costs is unacceptable and unconstitutional.”
The City Council, which approved the ordinance unanimously, can still override Booker's veto and is expected to discuss it again, in some form, at its August 3 meeting. And while we wait with bated breath? You can bet dollars to doughnuts that the many off-duty and retired cops rooting for the ordinance (as they would be the ones hired to do the guarding) will be pushing the Council to keep the idea alive in some form or other.
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cory booker
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Garth Johnston
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