On Mayor Řápková's populism

Chomutov has a problem with rent defaulters, and Mayor Ivana Řápková wants to solve it. She has begun advocating that the town take a harsh approach towards those who owe it money. She also claims to want to protect debtors from loan sharks.

The mayor has not stated what such protection would look like specifically. While it remains unclear who is supposed to come to Chomutov’s rescue, it is very clear that her slogans must be very pleasing to her public.

Everyone is now discussing the concept of populism, which can be characterized as an effort to win the favor of the public (the voters), irrespective of how the proposals concerned actually solve the essence of any given problem.

What, then, is the essence of the problem in Chomutov and other towns with high unemployment, neglected housing estates and infrastructure, and a large amount of debtors? The answer is trivial: It is the poor management of social work in these towns.

It is a fact that the rent defaulters owe the Chomutov town hall significant sums of money, but residents should be asking why their leaders allowed so many debts to accumulate in the first place. After all, the authorities are obliged to intervene directly should an unemployed welfare recipient not pay his or her rent to a municipal landlord. The lie that a welfare recipient must agree to send the amount owned to the town’s bank account has been repeated and then refuted a thousand times. The truth is that towns are obliged to make use of their ‘special beneficiary’ status. Period.

Another aggravating circumstance is that town leaders are unwilling to increase the staffing of their social welfare departments when problems arise. We should also not forget the absence of professional honor among many social workersm who are loyal primarily to the towns that pay their salaries, a loyalty that is strengthened by their concern that they might lose their jobs.

The practice in Chomutov is truly remarkable. The staff of the social welfare department are not permitted to communicate any data on persons collecting social welfare to third parties, but the collections agents are requesting information regarding specific people from them. Of course, the agents should never have found out where and how an individual’s welfare is to be disbursed.

No collections agent is authorized to demand someone prove their identity. Even though a police officer is authorized to do so, he or she can only do so on the basis of legally prescribed reasons (for example, suspecting the person of having committed a crime, etc.), and the officer is not authorized to communicate the identity ascertained to anyone else – not even to a collections agent. To do so is to commit the crime of abusing the powers of a public official.

A situation in which a collections agent "overhears" a client’s name when a police officer asks for the person’s identification and then basis seizes his or her money is illegal, both as concerns the police officer and the collections agent getting around the law.

Moreover, the town hall sent the media information about this procedure in advance, providing them with images from the CCTV cameras located above the counter concerned in the town hall, which is a violation of the law on the protection of personal data. Paradoxically, the faces of the police officers in these images had been digitally manipulated to render them unidentifiable, while the social workers’ clients were clearly identifiable.

In short, this was an effort to win favor, irrespective of whether the method chosen would actually help solve this onerous problem.