Perez sent out an enormous postcard that does nothing more than appeal to people’s sense of fear. On one side there is this creepy, almost Halloweenish-looking picture. It depicts a door, slightly ajar, with a view of the night sky. The equally Halloween-style text reads: “We can’t afford to go back to the way things were….” On the reverse side, the text reads: “When I. Charles Mathews was in charge, there were twice as many crimes in Hartford as there are today. Don’t turn back the clock.” Next to this– a blatantly misleading crime statistics chart.
He documents only two years, one in which Mathews presumably affected crime, and then one from 2006. This is misleading. If you look at a more detailed chart published by the Hartford Police Department, you can see that while there was a spike in crime in 1991, it dropped off sharply from there. You might also note that the dramatic decline occurs before Perez’s own tenure.
This postcard is nothing more than a desperate attempt at a smear campaign.