By Ted Cohen

Just hours after Vermont Daily Chronicle reported on two violent downtown beatings, the chief executive officer of the state’s largest city claimed arresting thugs is no answer to burgeoning crime.

“Progressive” Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak issued a prepared statement late Monday blasting a proposal by Democrat city councilors to crack down on dangerous lawlessness.

“We can’t arrest and imprison our way out of this,” the mayor asserted.

Mulvaney-Stanak was responding to a resolution sponsored by her opposition that calls for a focused police presence in downtown Burlington.

The resolve unveiled Friday by the Democrat City Council Caucus “clearly rejects the false choice between compassion and public safety, recognizing that lasting progress requires both meaningful support for people in crisis and consistent accountability for unlawful conduct,” said city councilor Mark Barlow.

The so-called Burlington Forward resolution will be introduced at a council meeting set for August 3.

Ironically, within roughly 24 hours of the resolution’s unveiling, two violent crimes unfolded in downtown Burlington – just weeks after the mayor called a news conference to say “Burlington is back.”

Back to rampant crime, apparently is what she meant.

Guy Page, editor of Vermont Daily Chronicle and Burlington Daily News, reported Monday on two vicious assaults in the inner city.

In one incident, two people allegedly lured a homeless man downtown, stole cash from him and slashed him in the face with a box cutter in the wee hours of Saturday.

A second incident saw three assailants punch, kick and spray a homeless woman with mace before stealing her purse in the main shopping district early Sunday.

All the while, the city’s first-term mayor was working on a statement claiming the Democrat proposed crackdown on crime “moves Burlington away from its values and contradicts what the data tell us works.”

Focusing on arrests instead of socialization are, Mulvaney-Stanak argues, “the hallmark of more conservative politics whose effectiveness has been debunked around the country.”

Mulvaney-Stanak apparently missed the part of the movie where going soft on actual crime, not vacuous, meaningless political rhetoric, “moves Burlington away from its values,” to use her poetry.