This is an FCB Radio news special reports breaking news here on the Outlaws Radio show in the FCB network. This is Darvy O King Vin Morrow. We're gonna jump right into it to Cleveland Browns players were robbed at gunpoint in downtown Cleveland, and Cleveland City Council President Blaine Griffin wanted to come on and address it and address the issue of crime in general that's impacting most major cities, but in Cleveland specifically. So what we're gonna do this is gonna be very different than how we normally do. This is this is breaking news. So this isn't an Outlaws extra, this isn't a regular episode. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna go to his comments right now and we'll take a break on the other side. So we're gonna go to Cleveland Council President Blaine Griffin. All right, Cleveland City Council President Blaine Griffin, how you doing? Sorry, I'm going Darvill. How are you today? Man? I'm good, I'm good. I just wanted to get your thoughts. I appreciate you m getting back to me on something that's obviously been in the news and pretty serious. I just wanted to get your thoughts on the two Cleveland Browns players that were robbed at gunpoint in downtown and a third Browns player whose car was stolen. Well, it just goes to show nobody's immune. And as I always say, is that people may think that a lot of these incidents may stay isolated in certain communities, but crime is going to come your way eventually if you don't treat all the communities and all the symptoms of crime the same way. So nobody's exempt. And I think this is tragic. I think this gives our city another black eye. And listen, man, I want to hold people accountable. I'm tired of trying to make excuses for people that violate people like this. When you get violated like this, we get being a Brown player elected official. When you get violated like this. If you've ever gotten your car stolen or your house broken into, it does something to your psyche and to your trauma that you never quite frankly, you know, return back to feeling safe again, which leads to an escalation and you know, more guns being bought and other things because people are fed up. Man. And let me say this, I think that we got to really start holding people accountable and stop making excuses when people do this egregious behavior. Yeah. Absolutely. And you mentioned about this being a black eye on the city, and obviously it is. We're in the national news for all the wrong reasons. Again, you give your thoughts about that. I'm concerned about how this makes the city. Look. I'm concerned, you know, if our players feel safe in our city. And it's not just obviously, and you know this, it's not just about the players themselves, but the teams contribute a lot economically to our city. So give your thoughts on it. We'll think about this. If these guys go to the rest of the community and the rest of the league or say, hey, man, I had these horrible experiences in Cleveland, how are we going to attract top tier Thailand in the age of the NBA and the NFL having ultra rich athletes trying to recruit their friends to come and join them in order to come championship teams. Do you think that they're going to go and sell our city to some of their friends and say, hey man, you got to come to Cleveland. If we continue to have some of this negative press, we have to do and be better. We have to start adopting a sense of excellence, and we got to start holding people accountable so that people can know you can't do this because you're going to get caught, and if you get caught, we are going to hold you account to the full extent of the law and deal with it. But we got a bigger issue, dark, and I just want to jump right into it. We only have nine recruits graduating from the class this year. If we don't get serious as a as a body and community about recruiting police officers and doing whatever we can, and I want to share with your radical idea. I'm gonna wait to you, uh, you know, wait to your next segment, but I will tell you that if we don't get serious about recruiting and starting to figure out alternative ways to really recruit some more, um you know, young people into this police force, we're going to continue to have these problems. We need to recruit people from our community that lived in our commerity to understand our community into the police force and stop pushing people away from it. Yeah. Yeah, and that's it's it's it's funny that you went there, because that's exactly where I was going next. Obviously, this is a symptom of a larger problem that's been going going in the city of Cleveland and has been rising over the last couple of years. And with your radical idea, tell us what that is, what you think the approach should be to address this issue that's really been getting out of control in the last couple of years. Now. People may disagree with me, but let me make this clear. When you are in Israel, you either have to sign up for community service or the military, or you have to make a decision on your career trajectory when you're eighteen years old, and at the very least you have to serve two years in the military as you prepare, you know, for your life's journey. And then after that you get significant amount of you know, a significant amount of incentives in order to go to school and college. So if you want to move out of the military, you can have the job and the money that you need to move into um, you know, in college, action or travel the world or whatever, or you actually can make a career in the military. I think we got to start doing the same thing with our law enforcement here. If you really want to get young people, we got to start off young as early as twelve, getting them on a path to trajectory to be in law enforcement by the time they're eighteen. So that we don't we stop being flexible on the choices. We need to say you're going to go to college, you're going to do community service, or you're going to go and do law enforcement and protect our community for three years and then earn money and then go to college. We got to start looking at things in a different lens. And I don't want to militarize our police department because quite frankly, I think when some of these young being and women go into service at eighteen years old, I think that we will have people that would want to make a lifetime career out of this. So I think we need to lower the age number one to eighteen, do like Israel does, and put more people in at an earlier age. And I think we need to extend the age that people can transfer into our departments to at least forty five because I don't know about you, but when I was forty five years old, man, I still felt like a sprain chicket, still run three miles and could still you know, lift weights and do all the other things too. So I think we need a youth injection in addition to more experience and try to find different alternative ways and incentivize going into law enforcement. So I would assume that would include like RTC, expanse and that kind of stuff. Yep, all of those things and everything above and really put people in the path that, you know, even if it's a trajectory that we're just training them, why they earn money to go to school, because the biggest impediment that we have, I think in our society is that people just run out of options by the time they're eighteen and out of high school. They can't afford to go to college, they don't want to go to military. I never forget the surgeon general m a certain general telling me that the biggest problem they have is not just a law enforcement but in uh not just a law enforcement but in the military, is that people can't pass the aptitude tests, people can't pass the physical agility tests, and people are not able to pass the drug tests. And listen, I'm one of the people that I think that marijuana and other things should be legal, but I also think that everybody should do something in moderation, and you should show some kind of discipline and some kind of of of you know, of you know, trying to stay focused and you know, and and and get on your career path before you start having all these civil liberties that everybody enjoys. UM. And once again, and real quick as we close, I appreciate you, UM taking the time to address these important issues. UM. Obviously, like I said, this has been a problem for a while, and it's it's not confined to one neighborhood. I think when we look at like the crime waves of like the eighties and the nineties, they were kind of confined to certain neighborhoods. It's not like that now. It's all over the place. Downtown is one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the city of Cleveland, and you have this kind of crime happening there. And like we talked about earlier, you know, there is a concern as far as how attractive and makes our city when it comes to you know, teams being able to recruit talent and stuff like that. So before we close here, what would you say to you know, NBA players, NFL players, people who are listening, who are in the sports world who may be concerned about Cleveland as a result of what happened. What would you say to him is this is not the norm. Most people in this city are good, well being people. I'm really praying and hoping and I truly believe that law enforcement is going to do their job. I think that we um, you know, got to make sure that these folks are held accountable. And we just got to make sure that we tell these NBA players that, hey, this is a great city. Compare us with other cities. Our crime rate and other things are not as high as some of these other places. We're still a great city that's affordable, that's manageable, that you can navigate easy. And don't get discouraged because quite frankly, people that live in some of these neighborhoods have been besieged and and and and attack this way, not in all of Cleveland, but in some parts of Cleveland for a long time. So if they haven't given up on this city, if they haven't turned their back on this city, then them and they shouldn't either. We all got to stand this together. And one last thing, Darbio, we gotta do better by holding the probation department accountable. The probation Department knows who these bad actors are, and we need to make sure that they're checking on them, making routine random checks and putting out um but restlaurrants when these guys break their probations. Because most of these guys, when you look at the back background of them, they're repeat offenders. And that's why we got to start holding some of these guys accountable. Cleveland City Council President, Blame Griffin, thank you so much once again, man for jumping on a short notice. One more time, I want to say thank you to Cleveland City Council President Blame Griffin for coming on on such short notice and uh sharing his thoughts and his proposal um as well. Really appreciated. All Right, we're out of here. We'll see you next time. Thank you so much. This has been a presentation of the FCB podcast Network, where real talk lifts. Visit us online at FCB podcasts dot com.
