What should our 30 new cops do? We still don’t know. I asked for that report, that Chief Noble Wray allegedly held in his hands last November, the night the council screwed up the 2009 and future budgets. He promised to get us that report that said what the 30 new officers were planned to do “tomorrow” – after we voted for them. Tomorrow never came.
Now, the Mayor will be getting a briefing this week, and the council and the community will be getting a briefing on July 28th after the Board of Estimates meeting about how we can more effectively and efficiently use our officers.
What caught my eye, was how Jason Joyce characterized the situation:
Freesmeyer runs a company called Etico Solutions Inc. which trains law enforcement agencies in “resource allocation.” Etico’s website says it can help police departments answer the following questions:
- How many officers must be put on the street each day to reach our agency goals?
- How many officers must be assigned to patrol?
- What is the most efficient deployment for existing staff?
About a year ago, residents of neighborhoods in southwest Madison demanded more of a police presence on the streets to discourage what they viewed as escalating criminal activity. The city responded by budgeting for 30 new cops this year, and some of those officers have already hit the streets.
The next step is to figure out how to most efficiently deploy those officers.
No. No! No!! No!!! No!!!! This is backwards! Is this the way you want your government to handle these types of situations. Do you want department heads and elected officials who pull a number from the air (30) and add that many police officers and then figure out, in retrospect, what to do with them? This is insane. Especially since it is part of what is making this year’s budget so dire and making the mayor say there will be no new projects this year. No new homeless services (cuz there is no problem there), no new recycling programs (like having recycling in our Parks!), no new economic development initiatives, no new salt practices for next winter, no new trainings for staff etc. etc. etc. No new programs because we needed 30 police officers to make the community feel good, but we don’t know what we are doing with them. And we don’t know if that could that have been 24, 8, 16, 28 or should that have been 40? Stupid.
No wonder they were so anxious to cancel that presentation of the annual police report at the last Council meeting.
