Blue Sheepdog

Time to jump up on the soapbox for just a minute.

My chief sent out an e-mail to the department the other day. The e-mail was prompted by the pinheads over in the city council. You see, Florida voted on a constitutional amendment recently. I suspect the amendment will be pretty hurtful to a lot of commercial enterprises as it will shift a larger portion of the tax burden onto them, but it will save homeowners a couple hundred dollars a year in the short term. Forget the economic impact, lets talk about the police department’s training budget.

The city has lots of projects going right now. For example, in an effort to rid a section of the community of hookers and drugs, the city is planting trees and putting in brick crosswalks. They are also expanding several of the parks and are funding (at a huge loss) a recycling program so we can be “green.” The city council also bought up a lot of property (at the peak of the real estate boom) that it cannot unload now.

The city council, seeing the tax revenue slip away, went into full panic mode. The council, in an effort to ensure the spending doesn’t exceed revenues, immediately started looking for ways to cut spending. However, the “beautification” projects (in the projects) continue, as does the arguing over how big to make the new “diversity” memorial in one of the parks. Also continuing is the curbside pick-up of all of your recycled goods (again, a huge money loser), so we can declare ourselves as a city that cares about the environment.

Most of you have already skipped ahead and guessed where this is going. Yep, a lot of the cuts are coming out of public safety. Among the cuts: hiring freeze, no overtime, and the elimination of all “non-essential” training.

Non-essential training? No, no…the mandatory diversity training and political correctness is still in place. Nope, we are talking about things like firearms practice for the SWAT team. (Patrol only gets to the range once a year, so they can’t cut that back any more than they already have.) Defensive tactics training for the road officers is cut back. I suspect that recruit training (should they actually hire anyone) would be severely curtailed.

Things like DUI patrols have also been suspended. I wonder what impact that will have on the overtime for the traffic-homicide investigators? Maybe as the DUI fatalities start piling up, they will have to make an exception for them.

So, in addition to doing more with less officers (both from a hiring freeze and a reduction of overtime), we are having to do it with less-trained officers. Yeah, this seems like a good idea.

At least the drug dealers can work from the shady new benches, and the whores have curb-side pick up for their mixed glass recyclables.