The latest mantra from the brass is "Make Work Fun Again."
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How to make it fun again. Hire more people. Give them decent pay.
That would be too smart though.
Smart Baaaaaaaaaaad!
Posted by: fritz | February 15, 2018 at 02:22 PM
I will say the pay is decent and the brass means well.
The problems are:
1) Lack of man power. There are not enough police officers. the city is growing. Apartment towers are replacing parking lots and houses across the city. The call volumes is up every year. Calls sit for hours. The 12 percent of time officers are not responding to calls, they are eating, cleaning out their cars, gassing up, read e-mails, training bulletins, and new department rules, writing reports, etc.
There is no time for patrol or proactive policing.
2) The amount of bureaucracy and administrative form filling crushes any incentive to work harder and makes the current call load a greater burden.
3) The department makes good arrests on a regular basis. Jail rarely keeps people for more than a few hours. Arrested subjects do not have to make bail. The county close more and more beds, but then they say they don't have more room, since they are "full."
4) The DA's Office declines a large number of cases for trivial reasons. If the case is not a home run, they don't want it.
Then, they have a policy of reducing felonies into misdemeanors and misdemeanors into violation.
5) Court sentences are limited to a handful of months. Reduced supervision probation, meaning probation in name only, is common.
There is little incentive to continue to commit crime.
The analogy I like to give is:
Your friend says to you, "Let's go to the store and get ice cream." Yes, we will have to walk, but it only a mile and I need you to carry this 100 pound backpack filled with rocks . Oh, when you get there, there won't be any ice cream and on the way back you can carry this other back, It only weighs 25 pounds in addition to the one you are already carrying.
Now, repeat his on a daily basis. Sometimes the walk is only a half mile. Sometimes, the walk is two miles. Sometimes. they want you to carry 50 pounds. On other days, they want you to carry 150.
There is never ice cream. It is just hard work.
Posted by: RD | February 16, 2018 at 02:53 PM