Add them up: The Imperial Avenue atrocity of 11 women raped and murdered by Anthony Sowell, the gunning down of Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams by out-of-control Cleveland police, and now the revelation that three young women have been held captive for years in a home on the city's near West Side right under our noses. And who knows how many other failures?
What does this tell us?
It tells us a version of what Atty. Gen. Mike DeWine reported about the recent police chase and gunning down with 137 bullets of two unarmed suspects, Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams.
DeWine said that the police chase of some 62 police cars -- 59 without permission -- racing at very high speeds through the city streets of Cleveland to capture and kill two unarmed suspects was a "systemic failure" of command and communications. It was more than that.
It goes a lot farther, doesn't it?
The revelation that these three women were held captive, no matter what the circumstances get revealed, shows that the systemic failure goes far beyond the police force.
Who is paying attention? What is happening on Cleveland streets?
Who are on the streets of Cleveland with open eyes? Apparently not the Cleveland police. They're paid to do that job. Where are they -- at Progressive Field?
These tragedies are only a symptom of a systemic failure of a town and its leadership that has utterly avoided giving a damned about its ordinary citizens.
The failure is through and through the system with no hint that it is even going to be recognized.
The media can run as big headlines as it wishes and as many breaking stories as it likes to air but it doesn't go beneath the surface.
It can't or it won't.
I watched city government for a long, long time and up very close at city hall.
The problems of carelessness began before my time here -- from the disastrous and uncaring days of urban renewal that destroyed communities and ways of life to the glorification of sports teams that overshadowed our problems.
We care more about how many new restaurants there are in downtown than in how the rest of the city lives.
"To hell with the people." Our leaders shout it in so many ways. But who hears?
How could Sowell, the rapist and murderer, and Ariel Castro -- the alleged kidnapper and alleged rapist of the three women, Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight -- quietly live on Cleveland streets for years without anyone knowing?
Why is there a police force?
Where were the mayors and other political leaders -- from George Voinovich, George Forbes, Jay Westbrook, now Frank Jackson and Martin Sweeney -- and what have they been doing? Our leaders.
They were more concerned about developers, building stadiums and arenas, attracting a gambling joint and doling out all kinds of subsidies but not paying attention obviously to where their citizens lived or how.
Crime stories and police have not been the focus at all of my attention through the years.
However, I have watched what the focus of this community's political, business and civic leaders has been. It has been far, far too much on what the Sam Millers, the Dick Jacobses, the Carneys, the Gunds and the Ratners have wanted. What business, developers and foundation leaders have said we need.
No one asked the ordinary people.
They have paid much less attention to the average Clevelander. The tragedies at Imperial Avenue and Seymour Avenue and in the street attest to this.
So does the poverty. The bad housing. The ill and dying children.
I don't know how Mayor Jackson, Safety Director Martin Flask and Police Chief Frank McGrath and the entire police force feel. They should feel deep, deep shame today.
They may have to swim in national attention now. I hope so. Because this town needs a drastic shaking up.
Roldo Bartimole has been reporting since 1959. He came to Cleveland in 1965 to report for the Plain Dealer where he worked twice in the 1960s, left for the Wall Street Journal in 1967. He started publishing his newsletter "Point of View" in 1968 and ended it in 2000. In 1991 he was awarded the Second Annual Joe Callaway Award for Civic Courage in Washington, D.C. He received the Distinguished Service Award of the Society of Professional Journalists, Cleveland chapter, in 2002, and was named to the Cleveland Journalism Hall of Fame, 2004.