When municipalities look to cut their budgets, they always go after the departments that they are mandated to fund and leaving their ancillary pet-project stuff alone.
Police/Sheriff departments are usually at the top of the list.
But they never cut the important stuff from the Po-Po’s budget: For example – The fuel bills for cruisers. Why do they let the officers/deputies take them home at night? In King County Sheriff’s Department the majority of the damage to cruiser doesn’t happen because of accidents, it occurs due to vandalism at the officers residence. Slashed tires, broken windows/mirrors/lights, etc.
If they were locked up at the precinct, behind a gate, this wouldn’t happen (and yes, I know about that jackass who tried to blow up cars in the SPD yard late last year. The keyword in the phrase is “tried”).
But it is not done because it is seen by the officers/deputies and their unions as one of the “perks of the badge”.
Seattle PD has officers that don’t even live inside the county limits, but get to drive their cruisers home every day. Why not make it a rule that you only get to take the car home if you live within the jurisdiction’s boundaries?
Or how’s about taking a chainsaw to the damn SWAT budget for once?
Over the last six months of 2009, SWAT teams were deployed 804 times in the state of Maryland, or about 4.5 times per day. In Prince George’s County alone, with its 850,000 residents, a SWAT team was deployed about once per day. According to a Baltimore Sun analysis, 94 percent of the state’s SWAT deployments were used to serve search or arrest warrants, leaving just 6 percent in response to the kinds of barricades, bank robberies, hostage takings, and emergency situations for which SWAT teams were originally intended.
Worse even than those dreary numbers is the fact that more than half of the county’s SWAT deployments were for misdemeanors and nonserious felonies. That means more than 100 times last year Prince George’s County brought state-sanctioned violence to confront people suspected of nonviolent crimes. And that’s just one county in Maryland.
I can see it now: Law & Order – SWAT LFU (Special Weapons And Tactics – Library Fines Unit)
Found via DailyPundit
I agree wholeheartedly.
It’s a job. The job has a lot of downsides, but a lot of perks. I lived in Duvall, WA for a few years, and there were more than a few Seattle PD and FD guys who lived in town and drove vehicles that should have been parked in a lot 35 miles away. That’s just retarded.
We ran into the same thing here in Louisville. Metro Government wanted to charge police officers a nominal fee for taking their cruisers home, and got rung out by the FOP. The fee would have been around $100 a month, and was supposed to cover gas and wear and tear on the vehicles.
End state was that the union got the new rules thrown out because they weren’t in the collective bargaining agreement, and the city has to wait to try to get it into the next contract. What BS.
“And that’s just one county in Maryland.”
Yep, and one of the most violent if not *the* most violent, coupled with Barney Fife-quality law enforcement. Meanwhile, the neighborhood where I used to live there waited a week to be plowed out after the Snowpocalyse II last month.
Another PGC SWAT success story, complete with official “aw shucks, nobody’s fault”:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/19/AR2009061903175.html
I am so glad to be out of that hellhole.