Would you rather be in Philadelphia…?

As well-covered here by How Appealing, a new federal anti-crime advertisement (pictured here) is raising a stir in South Dakota.  Here are highlights from this South Dakota newspaper article about the brouhaha:

If prison isn’t enough of a deterrent, officials in eastern Missouri hope a desolate portrayal of Yankton will dissuade potential criminals.  “Nobody you know has a clue where it is. There’s no airport, no bus station, no Amtrak,” a Project Safe Neighborhood poster claims of the community.

That the Justice Department, which paid for the advertisement, is trashing Yankton for a good cause — “commit a gun crime and we won’t just send you to prison,” the ad promises, “we’ll send you to Yankton” — doesn’t sit well with Sen. Tim Johnson, who fired off a letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales telling him there ought to be a better use of federal tax dollars.

“Violent gun crime is a serious problem that needs to be addressed but not at the expense of a community like Yankton and not by using federal dollars to disparage such a thriving, historic community,” Johnson said.  He wrote Gonzales, “These public service announcements, which have run in the Eastern District of Missouri describing Yankton as ‘600 miles away from nowhere,’ are inaccurate and an inappropriate expenditure of federal funds.”

I wonder what W.C. Fields might say about this intriguing flap over anti-cime messages.