Both Dwaine Caraway and I hope you had a fantastic summer vacation, but it is now time to get down to business at today's Public Safety Committee meeting. First up, Dallas Police Chief David Brown's crime report, wherein he is happy to report that overall crime is down 6.1%, due perhaps to the summer anti-crime initiative that I have had the pleasure of covering to some degree of late.

I'm looking at the graph type thing that's up on the screen right now, and I'm seeing that burglary of motor vehicles id down 10 percent, and that murder's down 14.1 percent, and that ... rape is up 25.3 percent? Dave Neumann's been hammering Brown for the past few minutes about car break-ins near Mountain Creek Parkway and about the effectiveness of police patrols and general presence in neighborhoods, and Delia Jasso's joining in, wondering how many property crimes are being perpetrated in the Mountain Creek Parkway area by residents, or are these out-of-towners?

And I am like, holy cow, can we get back to the one-quarter increase in rape? But Ms. Jasso read my mind, asking the Chief to explain the 25.3 percent increase in rapes -- is it that victims are reporting rapes more frequently, or that more rapes are happening? The answer, unfortunately: More rapes, says Chief Brown, specifically date rapes. And we all know what the solution to date rape is: getting women to stop drinking, because that is what causes date rape. Not dudes raping women, but women drinking.

"We're needing to create a message to the victims of this type of crime, related to, you know, someone you don't know that well, you having a little bit too much to drink," explains Chief Brown, suggesting women, "have your friends watch you" if you intend to drink in front of a man.

Moving on ...

... because we solved the rape problem because us gals aren't going to drink any more and make people rape us, to the "revolving door" problem at the jail, which was brought up by Sheffie Kadane, who is tired of seeing the same offenders commit crimes over and over again in his district.

"We need high bails, high bonds" at the jail, agrees Chief Brown in addition to longer sentences that keep repeat criminals off the streets. But Dwaine Caraway is like, dudes, that is not your problem. That is the county's problem, because they run the jail. And he has a solution: "November 2nd."

"We are the City of Dallas and they are the county," said Caraway. "I'm not for allowing county's responsibilities to reflect on our Dallas Police Department." Elected judges need to know that voters don't like habitual criminals on the street. So why don't we have a city jail, said Caraway? So we can put the murderers in one jail -- the county's -- and the petty criminals and other folk in the city jail, and Dwaine digressed, and so he cut himself off, and it was pretty shocking.

But the main item on the agenda today, of course, is Caraway's mighty crusade against, generally, things that make your mind go woo and associated paraphernalia, which he would like for you to not have access to, lest your mind go woo. He's leading with a "Blunt Wrap Presentation" given by two dudes from the Cigar Association of America, of which national tobacco companies are members, and we all know what swell, caring folks they are when it comes to worrying about your health and well being.

Cigar Dudes are highly offended that certain companies make "cigar" wrappers that are not intended to wrap cigars, but instead are intended to wrap THE MARIJUANA EVERYBODY PANIC. Cigar Dudes then made a pretty neat power point presentation with pictures of bongs and colorful blunt wrap packaging and also informed us of the website GrassCity.com, where you can go to learn how to wrap a blunt, which you should not do, per Dwaine Caraway and these cigar dudes, who would really prefer it if you would stick to tobacco, thanks.

Caraway seems to have gotten off on this tangent because of the massive national security threat to the children and kittens that is K2, which it appears as though nobody is dying from and especially not in Dallas, but whatever. So Dwaine wants to talk about those nasty cigar wraps, K2 and salvia, all at one time, because they are serious problems, according to Dwaine. "We need to entertain everything in one arena instead of handling them separately," which is pretty much the best description of the massive fail that is the war on drugs I've ever heard, thanks Dwaine.

Now, the discussion turns to the legality of trying to ban the sale of blunt wraps, etc., and I will continue to apprise you of the outcome in the comments below.