There’s a new police chief in town and he is a man of great experience and integrity. All the same, even great leaders need help now and then and here is what I have to offer. To Chief Michael Bussiere I give a list of the top seven suspects he will face as he battles crime in his Gotham. There is no group anywhere so wicked and wily as these seven. And they are:

Lust
No other sin is violated so often or in such a variety of ways. From the priest, businessman or school teacher who trolls down Lisbon Street for $40 hookers, to pale weirdoes who keep a stash of perversion on home computers, to the truly obsessed hiding in the shadows of the parking lot. Lust is as hot and seductive as ever, enticing the weak in dusty downtown bars and in the sprawling homes of the upper crust.

Gluttony
We have so much and yet we keep on grabbing for extra forks full. Dope, booze, money and the one substance on which this sin was based: food. We are fat and we keep on eating. We are drunk but we order one more drink at the bar. So much of our population is sluggish and bleary-eyed from overconsumption, it’s a wonder they have any strength at all to commit other sins. Oh, but they do.

Sloth
It’s a society where you will find women who produce as many children as they can just to collect a heftier state check. The same society in which a person truly committed to laziness can fake pain or injury and collect government funds while secretly continuing to enjoy their zeal for boogie boarding and bungee jumping. Sloth isn’t just laziness, it’s laziness at the cost of others. In our population are men and women who have worked their entire lives so that their bones seem to perpetually hum from the vigor of long labor. There are men and women who never toil at all and somehow manage to eat better, play better, live better than the rest of us. Sloth, it appears, is as much talent as it is sin.

Pride
If you are a politician, we’ll call it hubris. In an athlete we’ll brand it cockiness. Whoever you are and whatever you do, a sly part of you feels you are the best. Pride is a self-sustaining audacity some of us keep a secret while others wear it proudly like a crown. Most bar brawls, if examined closely enough, can be whittled back to a sense of pride that was threatened or wounded. Domestic fights, infidelity and any violence that occurs in the stands of a Little League game can be traced back there, too. Nobody is better suited to write about this particular sin than me, chief, because I am the best at everything.

Greed
This is lust where inanimate things are craved instead of flesh, although flesh is not altogether exempt from avaricious ways. Men will steal, con or kill to get more of that to which they feel they are entitled. More money, more dope, more toys in the garage. Crack dealers living large of bartered rock will nonetheless go for the bigger prize in the form of heftier shipments. Embezzlers can’t quit after that first ten grand and so they write one more check and get a few more zeroes tacked on to the pilfered bounty. The poor want to be rich. The rich want to be richer. Standing in the way of those pursuits is the law and the greedy will vault it at will.

Envy
Where pride ends, envy begins. Instead of celebrating our own high intelligence, wealth or good looks, we covet what others have. You want a wife as pretty as the gal your best friend married. You want a big fancy house like your brother has or as much dough as your neighbor. Some of us just burn silently while hating those who have more. Others try to force an equilibrium by stealing, raping or otherwise taking what could not be obtained by scrupulous means. Most of your political battles stem from a vicious mix of envy and pride. But what do I know? I’m not as smart or as handsome as you.

Wrath
It hardly needs attention here, does it? Revenge is born of it. Rage is its name on the street. When a sense of betrayal or dishonor becomes so great that the emotional barometer blows apart, we slash, burn or fire away. People get stabbed after a simple exchange of words. Seething men burn down the homes of the lovers who spurned them. Men and women are beaten with shovels, shot with hunting rifles, drowned, dropped from buildings, run over, poisoned, hanged by the neck and obliterated in countless and creative other ways as the sin of wrath sets us to boiling. Wrath is just another of the dirty seven, but he is most frequently the one to make headlines.

And there you have it, chief. Ferret out these seven and you will eliminate, not only crime from the streets but sin from the heart. And then we’ll both be out of a job. Really, who needs it?